Going Deeper with Strings
9. The in operator
The word in
is a boolean operator that takes two strings and returns True
if the first appears as a substring in the second:
>>> 'a' in 'banana' True >>> 'seed' in 'banana' False
For example, the following function prints all the letters from
word1
that also appear in word2
:
def in_both(word1, word2): for letter in word1: if letter in word2: print(letter)
With well-chosen variable names, Python sometimes reads like English. You could read this loop, “for (each) letter in (the first) word, if (the) letter (appears) in (the second) word, print (the) letter.” Here’s what you get if you compare apples and oranges:
>>> in_both('apples', 'oranges') a e s