Top-rated recipes tagged "searching"http://code.activestate.com/recipes/tags/searching/top/2011-08-19T05:17:00-07:00ActiveState Code RecipesSearch sequences for sub-sequence (Python) 2011-08-19T05:17:00-07:00Steven D'Apranohttp://code.activestate.com/recipes/users/4172944/http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577850-search-sequences-for-sub-sequence/ <p style="color: grey"> Python recipe 577850 by <a href="/recipes/users/4172944/">Steven D'Aprano</a> (<a href="/recipes/tags/find/">find</a>, <a href="/recipes/tags/searching/">searching</a>, <a href="/recipes/tags/sequence/">sequence</a>, <a href="/recipes/tags/string/">string</a>, <a href="/recipes/tags/sublist/">sublist</a>, <a href="/recipes/tags/substring/">substring</a>). </p> <p>The list and tuple index() method and <code>in</code> operator test for element containment, unlike similar tests for strings, which checks for sub-strings:</p> <pre class="prettyprint"><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; "12" in "0123" True &gt;&gt;&gt; [1, 2] in [0, 1, 2, 3] False </code></pre> <p>These two functions, search and rsearch, act like str.find() except they operate on any arbitrary sequence such as lists:</p> <pre class="prettyprint"><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; search([1, "a", "b", 2, 3], ["b", 2]) 2 </code></pre>