How to use a list of strings in regex

This is how you can use a list of strings in regex functions like the sub, find-all, etc. It also adds word boundaries so it will not match parts of other strings(e.g. Nick in Nicky).

import re

names=['Billy','George','Nick']
compiled_list=re.compile("|".join(["\\b"+i+"\\b" for i in names]))

test_string='Names: Billy, George, Nick, Nicky'
re.sub(compiled_list, '',test_string)

'Names: , , , Nicky'