Logic check using any value from a list?

Question

list = ["apples", "oranges", "jerky", "tofu"]

if "chew" in action and list[:] in action:
    print "Yum!"
else:
    print "Ew!"

How do I have a logic check where it checks for "chew" in action as well as ANY value in list? For example, I want to print "Yum!" whether action is "chew oranges" or "chew jerky".

Answer 1

Why not use the builtin any() function? The following seems quite Pythonic to me:

foods = ["apples", "oranges", "jerky", "tofu"]

if "chew" in action and any(f in action for f in foods):
    print "Yum!"
else:
    print "Ew!"

Of course, just searching for simple substrings may give some weird results. For instance "jerkeyblahchew" would still match the "Yum!" category. You'd probably want to split action into words, and look for food names that immediately follow "chew" (as @Peter Lyons suggests in his answer for the simple case where the first two words would be "chew X").

Ignoring order, you could focus just on space-separated words (and further ignore capital/lowercase) by using something like the following:

foods = ["apples", "oranges", "jerky", "tofu"]
action_words = set(word.lower() for word in action.split())

if "chew" in action_words and any(f in action_words for f in foods):
    print "Yum!"
else:
    print "Ew!"

Answer 2

if "chew" in action and action.split()[1] in list:
    print "Yum!"
else:
    print "Ew!"