How to test if a list contains another list?

Answer #1:

Here is my version:

def contains(small, big):
    for i in xrange(len(big)-len(small)+1):
        for j in xrange(len(small)):
            if big[i+j] != small[j]:
                break
        else:
            return i, i+len(small)
    return False

It returns a tuple of (start, end+1) since I think that is more pythonic, as Andrew Jaffe points out in his comment. It does not slice any sublists so should be reasonably efficient.

One point of interest for newbies is that it uses the else clause on the for statement – this is not something I use very often but can be invaluable in situations like this.

This is identical to finding substrings in a string, so for large lists it may be more efficient to implement something like the Boyer-Moore algorithm.

Answer #2:

If all items are unique, you can use sets.

>>> items = set([-1, 0, 1, 2])
>>> set([1, 2]).issubset(items)
True
>>> set([1, 3]).issubset(items)
False

Answer #3:

There’s an all() and any() function to do this.
To check if big contains ALL elements in small

result = all(elem in big for elem in small)

To check if small contains ANY elements in big

result = any(elem in big for elem in small)

the variable result would be boolean (TRUE/FALSE).

Answer #4:

May I humbly suggest the Rabin-Karp algorithm if the big list is really big. The link even contains almost-usable code in almost-Python.

Answer #5:

This works and is fairly fast since it does the linear searching using the builtin list.index() method and == operator:

def contains(sub, pri):
    M, N = len(pri), len(sub)
    i, LAST = 0, M-N+1
    while True:
        try:
            found = pri.index(sub[0], i, LAST) # find first elem in sub
        except ValueError:
            return False
        if pri[found:found+N] == sub:
            return [found, found+N-1]
        else:
            i = found+1

Answer #6:

After OP’s edit:

def contains(small, big):
    for i in xrange(1 + len(big) - len(small)):
        if small == big[i:i+len(small)]:
            return i, i + len(small) - 1
    return False

Answer #7:

Here’s a straightforward algorithm that uses list methods:

#!/usr/bin/env python

def list_find(what, where):
    """Find `what` list in the `where` list.

    Return index in `where` where `what` starts
    or -1 if no such index.

    >>> f = list_find
    >>> f([2, 1], [-1, 0, 1, 2])
    -1
    >>> f([-1, 1, 2], [-1, 0, 1, 2])
    -1
    >>> f([0, 1, 2], [-1, 0, 1, 2])
    1
    >>> f([1,2], [-1, 0, 1, 2])
    2
    >>> f([1,3], [-1, 0, 1, 2])
    -1
    >>> f([1, 2], [[1, 2], 3])
    -1
    >>> f([[1, 2]], [[1, 2], 3])
    0
    """
    if not what: # empty list is always found
        return 0
    try:
        index = 0
        while True:
            index = where.index(what[0], index)
            if where[index:index+len(what)] == what:
                return index # found
            index += 1 # try next position
    except ValueError:
        return -1 # not found

def contains(what, where):
    """Return [start, end+1] if found else empty list."""
    i = list_find(what, where)
    return [i, i + len(what)] if i >= 0 else [] #NOTE: bool([]) == False

if __name__=="__main__":
    import doctest; doctest.testmod()

Answer #8:

If we refine the problem talking about testing if a list contains another list with as a sequence, the answer could be the next one-liner:

def contains(subseq, inseq):
    return any(inseq[pos:pos + len(subseq)] == subseq for pos in range(0, len(inseq) - len(subseq) + 1))

Here unit tests I used to tune up this one-liner:

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/6910a85b4978daee137f