Find similar values in a list of lists

Question

I know this question is asked a lot, but they are all used for different things. What I want to happen:

#python 3.9
list = [["grass", "sand", "water"],["rock", "grass", "sand"]]
matches = ["sand", "water"]

Is there a way to find matches this way?

Please elaborate. What is the goal? Identify which sublists contain the words in `matches` or just determine if they're there somewhere? — sj95126, Aug 11 '22 at 00:13
Does this answer your question? [Python -Intersection of multiple lists?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3852780/python-intersection-of-multiple-lists) — ThatOneAmazingPanda, Aug 11 '22 at 00:37

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 11 '22 at 00:16

Convert the lists into sets and take their intersection. You can do this across an arbitrarily long list of sets in a single line with functools.reduce:

>>> my_list = [["grass", "sand", "water"],["rock", "grass", "sand"]]
>>> import functools
>>> functools.reduce(set.intersection, map(set, my_list))
{'grass', 'sand'}

Find similar values in a list of lists

1 Answers1