Patrick Hall wrote:
Hi Dave,
I have a list consisting of about 250 items, I need to know if a
particular item is in the list. I know this is better suited to a
dictionary but thats not the way it ended up ;-)
I could do a for loop to scan the list & compare each one, but I have a
suspission that there is a better way ?
Indeed there is: just use the built-in "in":
li = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'a', 'b', 'c']
'a' in li
True
'z' in li
False
That's a small example, but it will work equally well with a long
list. For instance, we can check to see if the words "Ahab", "whale",
and "pizza" are in the text of "Moby Dick" (I have the text in a file
called "moby.txt".)
moby = open('moby.txt').read() # Moby Dick, the whole thing!
mobywords = moby.split() # now mobywords has all the words in the text
'Ahab' in mobywords
True
'whale' in mobywords
True
'pizza' in mobywords
False
These results are unsurprising. 8^)
A list of 250 words is no problem -- "Moby Dick" has a couple hundred thousand:
len(mobywords)
214112
I'm not sure I understand why you think a dictionary would be better
in this case, a list seems fine to me.
Best,
Pat
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Thanks guys, something was rattling round by brain that there was a way,
but I just could not work it out :-)
Dave
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