Check if list items contains substrings from another list

Question

I have a lists:

my_list = ['abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456', 'def-111', 'qwe-111']  bad = ['abc', 'def'] 

and want to search for items that contain the string 'abc' and 'def' (and others in bad). How can I do that?

Almost same question here.

Answer 1

If you just want a test, join the target list into a string and test each element of bad like so:

>>> my_list = ['abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456', 'def-111', 'qwe-111'] >>> bad = ['abc', 'def'] >>> [e for e in bad if e in '\n'.join(my_list)] ['abc', 'def'] 

From your question, you can test each element as a sub string against the each element of the other this way:

>>> [i for e in bad for i in my_list if e in i] ['abc-123', 'abc-456', 'def-456', 'def-111'] 

It is fast (in comparison to one of the other methods):

>>> def f1(): ...    [item for item in my_list if any(x in item for x in bad)] ...  >>> def f2(): ...    [i for e in bad for i in my_list if e in i] ...  >>> timeit.Timer(f1).timeit() 5.062238931655884 >>> timeit.Timer(f2).timeit() 1.35371994972229 

From your comment, here is how you get the elements that do not match:

>>> set(my_list)-{i for e in bad for i in my_list if e in i} {'ghi-789', 'qwe-111'}