Regex pattern matching fails in Telegram bot message handler

Other Questions Telegram bot
1

I’ve been working on this for several days and can’t figure out what’s wrong with my regex implementation. I’m trying to detect specific words in user messages and respond accordingly:

import re
@bot.message_handler(content_types=['text'])
def process_message(msg):
    if msg.text == re.search(r'hi','Hi there'):
        bot.reply_to(msg, "Hello there")

The bot doesn’t respond at all when I send messages. What am I doing wrong with the regular expression matching?

2

You’re searching for ‘hi’ in the hardcoded string ‘Hi there’ instead of the actual user message. Plus, re.search() returns a Match object (or None), so your equality comparison won’t work. Try this: if re.search(r'\bhi\b', msg.text, re.IGNORECASE): The \b word boundaries stop it from matching ‘hi’ inside words like ‘this’ or ‘him’. I learned this the hard way - my bot started responding to every message with those letters. Without word boundaries, your regex gets too greedy and matches stuff you don’t want.

3

you’re comparing msg.text to the regex result, but that’s not right. use if re.search(r'hi', msg.text.lower()): instead - it’ll actually match the pattern in the message.

4

Your comparison logic is wrong. You’re checking if msg.text equals the result of searching for ‘hi’ in the string ‘Hi there’ - that’ll always be false. re.search() returns a match object or None, not a string you can compare against. You need to search the actual message text: if re.search(r'hi', msg.text, re.IGNORECASE): This searches for ‘hi’ in the user’s message, and re.IGNORECASE makes it case-insensitive so it catches both ‘hi’ and ‘Hi.’