I have two dataframes,

new1.Name       city0    sri won    chn1    pechi won  pune2    Ram won    mum0    pec won    keralanew3req
0   pec
1   mut

I tried,

mask=new1.Name.str.contains("|".join(new3.req.values.tolist()))
new1[mask]

I am getting,

 new1[mask]Name       city1  pechi won    pune0  pec won      kerala

As "pechi" contains "pec", it took this valu. but I want the exact match between the values not "contains"

my desired output is,

 new1[mask]Name       city0  pec won      kerala

You need \b that means "word boundary":

a = r'\b(' + "|".join(new3.req.values.tolist()) + r')\b'
print (a)
\b(pec|mut)\bmask=new1.Name.str.contains(a)
df = new1[mask]
print (df)Name    city
0  pec won  kerala