// Tutorial //

Python Find String in List

Published on August 3, 2022
Default avatar

By Pankaj

Python Find String in List

While we believe that this content benefits our community, we have not yet thoroughly reviewed it. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let us know by clicking the “report an issue“ button at the bottom of the tutorial.

We can use Python in operator to check if a string is present in the list or not. There is also a not in operator to check if a string is not present in the list.

l1 = ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'A', 'A', 'C']

# string in the list
if 'A' in l1:
    print('A is present in the list')

# string not in the list
if 'X' not in l1:
    print('X is not present in the list')

Output:

A is present in the list
X is not present in the list

Recommended Reading: Python f-strings Let’s look at another example where we will ask the user to enter the string to check in the list.

l1 = ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'A', 'A', 'C']
s = input('Please enter a character A-Z:\n')

if s in l1:
    print(f'{s} is present in the list')
else:
    print(f'{s} is not present in the list')

Output:

Please enter a character A-Z:
A
A is present in the list

Python Find String in List using count()

We can also use count() function to get the number of occurrences of a string in the list. If its output is 0, then it means that string is not present in the list.

l1 = ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'A', 'A', 'C']
s = 'A'

count = l1.count(s)
if count > 0:
    print(f'{s} is present in the list for {count} times.')

Finding all indexes of a string in the list

There is no built-in function to get the list of all the indexes of a string in the list. Here is a simple program to get the list of all the indexes where the string is present in the list.

l1 = ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'A', 'A', 'C']
s = 'A'
matched_indexes = []
i = 0
length = len(l1)

while i < length:
    if s == l1[i]:
        matched_indexes.append(i)
    i += 1

print(f'{s} is present in {l1} at indexes {matched_indexes}')

Output: A is present in ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'A', 'A', 'C'] at indexes [0, 4, 5]

You can checkout complete python script and more Python examples from our GitHub Repository.

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about us


Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!

Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in our Questions & Answers section, find tutorials and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business, and subscribe to topics of interest.

Sign up now
About the authors
Default avatar
Pankaj

author

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click here to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!
Try DigitalOcean for free