How Can I Efficiently Find Substrings Within a List of Strings?

Finding Substrings in Lists

Given a list of strings, we may need to check if a specific string appears within any of its elements. Unlike the common approach of searching for an exact match, we want to identify strings that contain the target string as a substring.

For instance, consider the list xs = ['abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456']. Checking for exact matches of 'abc' using if 'abc' in xs will only detect its exact occurrence and miss substrings like 'abc-123' and 'abc-456'.

To find substrings, we can utilize the in operator in combination with a list comprehension. The code below verifies the presence of 'abc' as a substring in any element of the list:

xs = ['abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456']

if any("abc" in s for s in xs):
    # 'abc' is present as a substring in at least one element

Alternatively, if we want to retrieve all the elements that include 'abc', we can modify the list comprehension as follows:

xs = ['abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456']

matching = [s for s in xs if "abc" in s]

print(matching)  # ['abc-123', 'abc-456']

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