Question

I have a list of strings – something like

mytext = ['This is some text','this is yet more text','This is text that contains the substring foobar123','yet more text']

I want to find the first occurrence of anything that starts with foobar. If I was grepping then I would do search for foobar*. My current solution looks like this

for i in mytext:
    index = i.find("foobar")
    if(index!=-1):
        print i

Which works just fine but I am wondering if there is a ‘better’ (i.e more pythonic) way of doing this?

Cheers,
Mike

Answer 1

You can also use a list comprehension :

matches = [s for s in mytext if 'foobar' in s]

(and if you were really looking for strings starting with ‘foobar’ as THC4k noticed, consider the following :

matches = [s for s in mytext if s.startswith('foobar')]