Question

**Note- I will not just be testing at the end of a string– need to locate particular substrings anywhere in the string

What is the fastest way to check to make sure a string does not contain multiple values. My current method is inefficient and unpythonic:

if string.find('png') ==-1 and sring.find('jpg') ==-1 and string.find('gif') == -1 and string.find('YouTube') == -1:

Answer 1

if you’re testing just the end of the string, remember that str.endswith can accept a tuple.

>>> "test.png".endswith(('jpg', 'png', 'gif'))
True

otherwise:

>>> import re
>>> re.compile('jpg|png|gif').search('testpng.txt')
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xb74a46e8>
>>> re.compile('jpg|png|gif').search('testpg.txt')