Python list 'in' statement doesn't work correctly

Question

I tried to used 'in' function to check some value available in a list or not. But it does not work correctly.

from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize

x ='what are bad'
a= word_tokenize(x)[0]
qestion = ['what,why,how,are,am,should']

if a in qestion:
 print 'question'
else:
 print 'not a question'

I couldn't find the reason for that. Can any one help me to solve this.

I don't think ['what,why,how,are,am,should'] does what you want: that's a list with only 1 element in it — njzk2
– njzk2, Commented Jun 3, 2017 at 5:25

e4c5 · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-03 05:25:42Z

6

The following certainly is a list, but I don't think it's the list that you were looking for.

 qestion = ['what,why,how,are,am,should']

i think what you wanted was

question = 'what,why,how,are,am,should'.split(',')

which produces

['what', 'why', 'how', 'are', 'am', 'should']

Which is more likely to full fill your IF x in y condition.

answered Jun 3, 2017 at 5:25

e4c5

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4 Comments

Chathuri Fernando Over a year ago

Thank you. This is what I expected.

e4c5 Over a year ago

Glad to have been of help and all the best with your project.

Chathuri Fernando Over a year ago

Can you explain please why we should use .split(',') in this case.

e4c5 Over a year ago

Well the split function breaks up a strin into pieces. Since laziness is a virtue in programming using split here is easier than manually converting your original list to the required format :-)

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