Check variable if it is in a list

Question

I am fairly new to Python, and I was wondering if there was a succinct way of testing a value to see if it is one of the values in the list, similar to a SQL WHERE clause. Sorry if this is a basic question.

MsUpdate.UpdateClassificationTitle in (
        'Critical Updates',
        'Feature Packs',
        'Security Updates',
        'Tools',
        'Update Rollups',
        'Updates',
        )

i.e, I want to write:

if MsUpdate.UpdateClassificationTitle in (
        'Critical Updates',
        'Feature Packs',
        'Security Updates',
        'Tools',
        'Update Rollups',
        'Updates'
        ):  
    then_do_something()

Answer 1

Seems succinct enough, but if you're using it more than once you should name the tuple:

titles = ('Critical Updates',
    'Feature Packs',
    'Security Updates',
    'Tools',
    'Update Rollups',
    'Updates')

if MsUpdate.UpdateClassificationTitle in titles:  
    do_something_with_update(MsUpdate)

Tuples use parenthesis. If you want a list change it to square brackets. Or use a set, which has faster lookups.