How to check if multiple substrings appear together in a string

Question

strings = ['I have a bird', 'I have a bag and a bird', 'I have a bag']
words = ['bird','bag']

I want to find the string that includes both bird and bag in the list strings, regardless of order. So the result for only the second element in strings should be true and the rest should be false.

The output I want:

False
True
False

words do not necessarily need to be stored in list, and I know that regex could do a similar thing but I would prefer to use other ways than regex because my words are mandarin chinese which requires some complicated use of regex than english.

The nested-for loop solutions are fine but they don't scale well. If you have huge amount of text and your text or query words are related by common prefixes, this may help you. — Cong Ma
– Cong Ma, Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 9:38

languitar · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-28 09:21:26Z

8

List comprehension will work combined with the all function:

[all([k in s for k in words]) for s in strings]

This results in the following on your example:

[False, True, False]

answered Apr 28, 2017 at 9:21

languitar

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1 Comment

qPCR4vir Over a year ago

[all(word in sentence for word in words) for sentence in strings] :-)

Fuji Komalan · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-28 09:27:12Z

2

strings = ['I have a bird', 'I have a bag and a bird', 'I have a bag']
words = ['bird','bag']


for string in strings:
  stringlist = string.split()
  word1 , word2 = words
  if word1 in stringlist and word2 in stringlist:
    print(True)
  else:
    print(False)

Result

False True False

answered Apr 28, 2017 at 9:27

Fuji Komalan

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1 Comment

Asteroid098 Over a year ago

I now get how things work, thanks! I didn't know I needed to split the strings before I try to find the words within the string.

Aakash Goel · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-28 10:08:24Z

1

Use of function all() would be best option here, but point is doing without for loop. Here is solution using map/lambda function.

strings = ['I have a bird', 'I have a bag and a bird', 'I have a bag']
words = ['bird','bag']
map(lambda x: all(map(lambda y:y in x.split(),words)),strings)

output would be:

[False, True, False]

However, Naive Solution is for beginner:

for string in strings:
    count_match=0
    for word in words:
        if word in string.split():
            count_match+=1
    if(count_match==len(words)):
        print "True"
    else:
        print "False"

And output would be :

False
True
False

edited Apr 28, 2017 at 10:08

answered Apr 28, 2017 at 10:00

Aakash Goel

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Comments

nikhalster · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-28 12:23:53Z

1

For variable number of words, without using the split function.

strings = ['I have a bird', 'I have a bag and a bird', 'I have a bag']
words = ['bird','bag']

 for string in strings:
    print(all(word in string for word in words))

answered Apr 28, 2017 at 12:23

nikhalster

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Comments

s3bw · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-28 21:42:57Z

1

This is it:

for substring in strings:
    k = [ w for w in words if w in substring ]
    print (len(k) == len(words) )

edited Apr 28, 2017 at 21:42

answered Apr 28, 2017 at 9:20

s3bw

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2 Comments

Asteroid098 Over a year ago

I would prefer this one but it only resulted in false false?

s3bw Over a year ago

Sorry, I didn't understand your initial question - but i've fixed my answer

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