Question

I’m writing an if statement in Python with a lot of OR conditions. Is there an elegant way to do this with a list, within in the condition rather than looping through the list?

In other words, what would be prettier than the following:

if foo == 'a' or foo == 'b' or foo == 'c' or foo == 'd':

I’ve just taken up Python, and the language has me wanting to write better.

Answer 1

if foo in ('a', 'b', 'c', 'd'):
    #...

I will also note that your answer is wrong for several reasons:

1. You should remove parentheses.. python does need the outer ones and it takes room.
2. You’re using an assignment operator, not an equality operator (=, not ==)
3. What you meant to write as foo == ‘a’ or foo == ‘b’ or …, what you wrote wasn’t quite correct.