Question

Trying to clean up a python list, I am able to remove exact string matches. How do I remove partial matches?

exclude = ['\n','Hits','Sites','blah','blah2','partial string','maybe here']
newlist = []
for item in array:
    if item not in exclude:
        newlist.append(item)

Problem here is “item not in exclude”… which does exact matching.

Should I use the following method:

s = "This be a string"
if s.find("is") == -1:
    print "No 'is' here!"
else:
    print "Found 'is' in the string."

In a way i answered my own question 🙂 I guess is there an operand alternative to ‘in’ ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Is this what you are searching for?

blacklist = ['a', 'b', 'c']
cleaned = []
for item in ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']:
    clean = True
    for exclude in blacklist:
        if item.find(exclude) != -1:
            clean = False
            break
    if clean:
        cleaned.append(item)
print cleaned # --> ['foo']