Question

I’m trying to check whether a user-inputted string is contained in a list of other strings AND any permutation of those strings, separated by a “*”.

In other words, here’s the code I have so far:

user_string=raw_input("Please supply a string")


viable_entries=['this', 'that', 'something else']

if user_string in viable_entries:
    print "here I'd move on with my script"

I’d also want to print “here I’d move on with my script” if user_string = “something else*this” or “this*that”, etc.

Is there an easy, pythonic way to do this?

Answer 1

You can split the input and use set.issubset:

if set(user_string.split('*')).issubset(viable_entries):
     ...

Note that this gives True even if an entry is repeated ("this*this"). If you want to prevent the user providing repeated entries you can use len(set):

entries = user_string.split('*')
if set(entries).issubset(viable_entries) and len(set(entries)) == len(entries):
     ...