Check if multiple strings exist in another string

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How can I check if any of the strings in an array exists in another string?

Like:

a = ['a', 'b', 'c']
str = "a123"
if a in str:
  print "some of the strings found in str"
else:
  print "no strings found in str"

That code doesn't work, it's just to show what I want to achieve.

17 Answers

A surprisingly fast approach is to use set:

a = ['a', 'b', 'c']
str = "a123"
if set(a) & set(str):
    print("some of the strings found in str")
else:
    print("no strings found in str")

This works if a does not contain any multiple-character values (in which case use any as listed above). If so, it's simpler to specify a as a string: a = 'abc'.

A compact way to find multiple strings in another list of strings is to use set.intersection. This executes much faster than list comprehension in large sets or lists.

>>> astring = ['abc','def','ghi','jkl','mno']
>>> bstring = ['def', 'jkl']
>>> a_set = set(astring)  # convert list to set
>>> b_set = set(bstring)
>>> matches = a_set.intersection(b_set)
>>> matches
{'def', 'jkl'}
>>> list(matches) # if you want a list instead of a set
['def', 'jkl']
>>>

The regex module recommended in python docs, supports this

words = {'he', 'or', 'low'}
p = regex.compile(r"\L<name>", name=words)
m = p.findall('helloworld')
print(m)

output:

['he', 'low', 'or']

Some details on implementation: link

Just some more info on how to get all list elements availlable in String

a = ['a', 'b', 'c']
str = "a123" 
list(filter(lambda x:  x in str, a))

Yet another solution with set. using set.intersection. For a one-liner.

subset = {"some" ,"words"} 
text = "some words to be searched here"
if len(subset & set(text.split())) == len(subset):
   print("All values present in text")

if subset & set(text.split()):
   print("Atleast one values present in text")
flog = open('test.txt', 'r')
flogLines = flog.readlines()
strlist = ['SUCCESS', 'Done','SUCCESSFUL']
res = False
for line in flogLines:
     for fstr in strlist:
         if line.find(fstr) != -1:
            print('found') 
            res = True


if res:
    print('res true')
else: 
    print('res false')

output example image

I would use this kind of function for speed:

def check_string(string, substring_list):
    for substring in substring_list:
        if substring in string:
            return True
    return False
data = "firstName and favoriteFood"
mandatory_fields = ['firstName', 'lastName', 'age']


# for each
for field in mandatory_fields:
    if field not in data:
        print("Error, missing req field {0}".format(field));

# still fine, multiple if statements
if ('firstName' not in data or 
    'lastName' not in data or
    'age' not in data):
    print("Error, missing a req field");

# not very readable, list comprehension
missing_fields = [x for x in mandatory_fields if x not in data]
if (len(missing_fields)>0):
    print("Error, missing fields {0}".format(", ".join(missing_fields)));

If you want exact matches of words then consider word tokenizing the target string. I use the recommended word_tokenize from nltk:

from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize

Here is the tokenized string from the accepted answer:

a_string = "A string is more than its parts!"
tokens = word_tokenize(a_string)
tokens
Out[46]: ['A', 'string', 'is', 'more', 'than', 'its', 'parts', '!']

The accepted answer gets modified as follows:

matches_1 = ["more", "wholesome", "milk"]
[x in tokens for x in matches_1]
Out[42]: [True, False, False]

As in the accepted answer, the word "more" is still matched. If "mo" becomes a match string, however, the accepted answer still finds a match. That is a behavior I did not want.

matches_2 = ["mo", "wholesome", "milk"]
[x in a_string for x in matches_1]
Out[43]: [True, False, False]

Using word tokenization, "mo" is no longer matched:

[x in tokens for x in matches_2]
Out[44]: [False, False, False]

That is the additional behavior that I wanted. This answer also responds to the duplicate question here.

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