Check if string is contained in list element

Question

I have a sample list of possible incident:

incident = [
    "road", "free", "block", "bumper", "accident","robbery","collapse","fire","police","flood"]

and i want to check if a sentence has any of this words in it.

eg. "the building is on fire"

this should return true since the list has fire in it and return false if otherwise.

I tried doing it with this method :

query = "@user1 @handler2 the building is on fire"

if any(query in s for s in incidentList):
    print("yes")
else:
    print("no")

but it always fail as oppose to when query = "fire".

Edit

and in situation when incident contains an element say: "street fight", i want it to return true assuming the query contains either street or fight. How do i fix this?

Are you OK with matching road when words like broad are present? What if a username contains one of the incident words like @firefighter? Wouldn't you want to be case-insensitive? Right now, Police would not be found... — Tim Pietzcker
– Tim Pietzcker, Commented Mar 20, 2016 at 15:51
@TimPietzcker that's true, but i can just make the everything lower case then. — Belvi Nosakhare
– Belvi Nosakhare, Commented Mar 20, 2016 at 15:55

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-20 16:11:45Z

6

s refers to every incident in the list of incidents, check if s is in query instead:

if any(s in query for s in incidentList):

and in situation when incident contains an element say: "street fight", i want it to return true assuming the query contains either street or fight. How do i fix this?

Then, either improve the incidentList to contain individual words only, or you should also split the s in the loop:

if any(any(item in query for item in s.split()) for s in incidentList):

edited Mar 20, 2016 at 16:11

answered Mar 20, 2016 at 15:48

alecxe

476k127 gold badges1.1k silver badges1.2k bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

Ian · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-20 15:50:55Z

3

You are almost there, just need to do it the reverse way:

incident = [
    "road", "free", "block", "bumper", "accident","robbery","collapse","fire","police","flood"]

query = "@user1 @handler2 the building is on fire"

if any(s in query for s in incident):
    print("yes")
else:
    print("no")

Which makes sense, because you want to check for every s in incident (any word, including fire), if that s (that is, fire) is in query too.

You do not want to say if query (that is, your whole sentence) is in s (that is, a word like fire)

answered Mar 20, 2016 at 15:50

Ian

30.9k20 gold badges76 silver badges112 bronze badges

Comments

Sourav · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-20 17:44:05Z

1

Hope this helps..

import sys
incident = ["road", "free", "block", "bumper", "accident","robbery","collapse","fire","police","flood", "street fight"]
sentence = "street is awesome"
sentence = sentence.split()
for word in sentence:       
    for element in incident:
        if word in element.split():
            print('True')
            sys.exit(0)

answered Mar 20, 2016 at 17:44

Sourav

5142 gold badges13 silver badges29 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Check if string is contained in list element

3 Answers 3

Comments

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

3 Answers 3

Comments

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related