[Tut] Python Find in List [Ultimate Guide]

Python Find in List [Ultimate Guide]

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When Google was founded in 1998, Wallstreet investors laughed at their bold vision of finding data efficiently in the web. Very few people actually believed that finding things can be at the heart of a sustainable business — let alone be a long-term challenge worth pursuing.

We have learned that searching — and finding — things is crucial wherever data volumes exceed processing capabilities. Every computer scientist knows about the importance of search.

And even non-coders don’t laugh about Google’s mission anymore!

This article will be the web’s most comprehensive guide on FINDING stuff in a Python list.

It’s a living document where I’ll update new topics as I go along — so stay tuned while this article grows to be the biggest resource on this topic on the whole web!

Let’s get started with the very basics of finding stuff in a Python list:

Finding an Element in a List Using the Membership Operator

You can use the membership keyword operator in to check if an element is present in a given list. For example, x in mylist returns True if element x is present in my_list using the equality == operator to compare all list elements against the element x to be found.

Here’s a minimal example:

my_list = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Sergey', 'Larry', 'Eric', 'Sundar'] if 'Eric' in my_list: print('Eric is in the list')

The output is:

Eric is in the list

Here’s a graphical depiction of how the membership operator works on a list of numbers:

Figure 1: Check the membership of item 42 in the list of integers.

To dive deeper into this topic, I’d love to see you watch my explainer video on the membership operators here:

https://www.sickgaming.net/blog/2022/12/...ate-guide/