Python Check if all of the following items is in a list

Question

I found, that there is related question, about how to find if at least one item exists in a list:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/740287/python-check-if-one-of-the-following-items-is-in-a-list

But what is the best and pythonic way to find whether all items exists in a list?

Searching througth the docs I found this solution:

>>> l = ['a', 'b', 'c']
>>> set(['a', 'b']) <= set(l)
True
>>> set(['a', 'x']) <= set(l)
False

Other solution would be this:

>>> l = ['a', 'b', 'c']
>>> all(x in l for x in ['a', 'b'])
True
>>> all(x in l for x in ['a', 'x'])
False

But here you must do more typing.

Is there any other solutions?

Answer 1

I would probably use set in the following manner :

set(l).issuperset(set(['a','b'])) 

or the other way round :

set(['a','b']).issubset(set(l)) 

I find it a bit more readable, but it may be over-kill. Sets are particularly useful to compute union/intersection/differences between collections, but it may not be the best option in this situation ...

Answer 2

Operators like <= in Python are generally not overriden to mean something significantly different than "less than or equal to". It's unusual for the standard library does this--it smells like legacy API to me.

Use the equivalent and more clearly-named method, set.issubset. Note that you don't need to convert the argument to a set; it'll do that for you if needed.

set(['a', 'b']).issubset(['a', 'b', 'c'])

Answer 3

I like these two because they seem the most logical, the latter being shorter and probably fastest (shown here using new Set Literals which were backported to Python 2.7):

all(x in {'a', 'b', 'c'} for x in ['a', 'b'])
# or
{'a', 'b'}.issubset({'a', 'b', 'c'})