Check if a Python list item contains a string inside another string
Check if a Python list item contains a string inside another string
Question
I have a list:
my_list = ['abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456']
and want to search for items that contain the string 'abc'. How can I do that?
if 'abc' in my_list:
would check if 'abc' exists in the list but it is a part of 'abc-123' and 'abc-456', 'abc' does not exist on its own. So how can I get all items that contain 'abc' ?
Accepted Answer
If you only want to check for the presence of abc in any string in the list, you could try
some_list = ['abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456']
if any("abc" in s for s in some_list):
# whatever
If you really want to get all the items containing abc, use
matching = [s for s in some_list if "abc" in s]
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Just throwing this out there: if you happen to need to match against more than one string, for example abc and def, you can combine two comprehensions as follows:
matchers = ['abc','def']
matching = [s for s in my_list if any(xs in s for xs in matchers)]
Output:
['abc-123', 'def-456', 'abc-456']
Use filter to get at the elements that have abc.
>>> lst = ['abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456']
>>> print filter(lambda x: 'abc' in x, lst)
['abc-123', 'abc-456']
You can also use a list comprehension.
>>> [x for x in lst if 'abc' in x]
By the way, don't use the word list as a variable name since it is already used for the list type.
If you just need to know if 'abc' is in one of the items, this is the shortest way:
if 'abc' in str(my_list):
This is quite an old question, but I offer this answer because the previous answers do not cope with items in the list that are not strings (or some kind of iterable object). Such items would cause the entire list comprehension to fail with an exception.
To gracefully deal with such items in the list by skipping the non-iterable items, use the following:
[el for el in lst if isinstance(el, collections.Iterable) and (st in el)]
then, with such a list:
lst = [None, 'abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456', 123]
st = 'abc'
you will still get the matching items (['abc-123', 'abc-456'])
The test for iterable may not be the best. Got it from here: In Python, how do I determine if an object is iterable?