python - Check if substring is in a list of strings?

Question

I have found some answers to this question before, but they seem to be obsolete for the current Python versions (or at least they don't work for me).

I want to check if a substring is contained in a list of strings. I only need the boolean result.

I found this solution:

word_to_check = 'or'
wordlist = ['yellow','orange','red']

result = any(word_to_check in word for word in worldlist)

From this code I would expect to get a True value. If the word was "der", then the output should be False.

However, the result is a generator function, and I can't find a way to get the True value.

Any idea?

Answer 1

The code you posted using any() is correct and should work unless you've redefined it somewhere.

That said, there is a simple and fast solution to be had by using the substring search on a single combined string:

>>> wordlist = ['yellow','orange','red']
>>> combined = ''.join(wordlist)

>>> 'or' in combined
True
>>> 'der' in combined
False

This should work much faster than the approach using any. The join character can be any character that doesn't occur in one of the words in the wordlist.