Question

I’m trying to run a program which is effectively doing the following:

if [4, 5, False, False, False, False] in {}

And, on this line, I’m getting a TypeError: unhashable type 'list'

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The code if foo in {} checks if any of the keys of the dictionary is equal to foo.

In your example, foo is a list. A list is an unhashable type, and cannot be the key of a dictionary.

If you want to check if any entry of a list is contained in a dictionaries’ keys or in a set, you can try:

if any([x in {} for x in (4, 5, False)]).

If you want to check if any of your values is equal to your list, you can try:

if any([v == [4, 5, False, False, False, False] for v in your_dict.values()])