How do I check existence of a string in a list of strings, including substrings?

Question

I have written a function to check for the existence of a value in a list and return True if it exists. It works well for exact matches, but I need for it to return True if the value exists anywhere in the list entry (e.g. value <= listEntry, I think.) Here is the code I am using for the function:

def isValInLst(val,lst):
    """check to see if val is in lst.  If it doesn't NOT exist (i.e. != 0), 
    return True. Otherwise return false."""
    if lst.count(val) != 0:
        return True
    else:
        print 'val is '+str(val)
        return False

Without looping through the entire character string and/or using RegEx's (unless those are the most efficient), how should I go about this in a pythonic manner?

This is very similar to another SO question, but I need to check for the existence of the ENTIRE val string anywhere in the list. It would also be great to return the index / indices of matches, but I'm sure that's covered elsewhere on Stackoverflow.

Answer 1

If I understood your question then I guess you need any:

return any(val in x for x in lst)

Demo:

>>> lst = ['aaa','dfbbsd','sdfdee']
>>> val = 'bb'
>>> any(val in x  for x in lst)
True
>>> val = "foo"
>>> any(val in x  for x in lst)
False
>>> val = "fde"
>>> any(val in x  for x in lst)
True