Checking whether a string starts with XXXX

RanRag has already answered it for your specific question.

However, more generally, what you are doing with

if [[ "$string" =~ ^hello ]]

is a regex match. To do the same in Python, you would do:

import re
if re.match(r'^hello', somestring):
    # do stuff

Obviously, in this case, somestring.startswith('hello') is better.

aString = "hello world"
aString.startswith("hello")

More info about startswith.

In case you want to match multiple words to your magic word, you can pass the words to match as a tuple:

>>> magicWord = 'zzzTest'
>>> magicWord.startswith(('zzz', 'yyy', 'rrr'))
True

startswith takes a string or a tuple of strings.