how to find if an element from an array is a substring of a string?

Question

Given a string s = "Leonhard Euler", I need to find if an element in my surname array is a substring of s. For example:

s = "Leonhard Euler"
surnames = ["Cantor", "Euler", "Fermat", "Gauss", "Newton", "Pascal"]
if any(surnames) in s:
    print("We've got a famous mathematician!")

Possible duplicate of [Does Python have a string contains substring method?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3437059/does-python-have-a-string-contains-substring-method) — Matthew, Aug 03 '16 at 15:02
That's not how `any` works. Try `if any(surname in s for surname in surnames):` — Aran-Fey, Aug 03 '16 at 15:03
`if any(x in s for x in surnames)` ? keep in mind that this would pass `'Eu'` to also count as true. Better idea is to split your name into individual names and match exact words. — R Nar, Aug 03 '16 at 15:03

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 03 '16 at 15:03

5

Consider if any(i in surnames for i in s.split()):.

This will work for both s = "Leonhard Euler" and s = "Euler Leonhard".

answered Aug 03 '16 at 15:03

DeepSpace

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 03 '16 at 15:11

You can use isdisjoint attribute of sets after splitting the string to list to check if the two lists casted to sets have any elements in common.

s = "Leonhard Euler"
surnames = ["Cantor", "Euler", "Fermat", "Gauss", "Newton", "Pascal"]

strlist = s.split()
if not set(strlist).isdisjoint(surnames):
    print("We've got a famous mathematician!")

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 03 '16 at 15:04

s = "Leonhard Euler"
surnames = ["Cantor", "Euler", "Fermat", "Gauss", "Newton", "Pascal"]

for surname in surnames:
   if(surname in s):
       print("We've got a famous mathematician!")

Loops through each string in surnames and checks if its a substring of s

Xavier C. · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-03T15:23:10.703

1

If you don't need to know which surname is in s you can do that using any and list comprehension:

if any(surname in s for surname in surnames):
    print("We've got a famous mathematician!")

edited Aug 03 '16 at 15:23

answered Aug 03 '16 at 15:07

Xavier C.

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 03 '16 at 15:04

0

Actually I didn't test the the code but should be something like this (if I understood the question):

for surname in surnames:
  if surname in s:
    print("We've got a famous mathematician!")

answered Aug 03 '16 at 15:04

Michele

1

This implementation will print multiple times if there are multiple matches. I think that OP only wants it to print once, which means you would need to `break` out of the loop when you find a match. – Harrison Aug 03 '16 at 15:27

how to find if an element from an array is a substring of a string?

5 Answers5