Find exact match in list of strings

Question

very new to this so bear with me please...

I got a predefined list of words

checklist = ['A','FOO']

and a words list from line.split() that looks something like this

words = ['fAr', 'near', 'A']

I need the exact match of checklist in words, so I only find 'A':

if checklist[0] in words:

That didn't work, so I tried some suggestions I found here:

if re.search(r'\b'checklist[0]'\b', line): 

To no avail, cause I apparently can't look for list objects like that... Any help on this?

Answer 1

Using a set would be much faster than iterating through the lists.

checklist = ['A', 'FOO']
words = ['fAr', 'near', 'A']
matches = set(checklist).intersection(set(words))
print(matches)  # {'A'}