Looping through dictionary and getting TypeError: 'in <string>' requires string as left operand, not list

Question

I'm trying to loop through a list of strings and match/print out any of those strings against a dictionary of words. I seem to get the following error and not too sure why.

Error: TypeError: 'in ' requires string as left operand, not list

Here is the current code i'm working with:

data = ["Great price on the dewalt saw", "cool deal, love it", "nice find", "definitely going to buy"]
words = {'price': ['price', 'compare', '$', 'percent', 'money']}

for d in data:
    for word in words.values():
        if word in d:
            print('Results:')
            print(d)

Ideally i'd like to print out all strings that contain any of the price key values.

Abhishek Bhagate · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-04 19:16:31Z

2

word is returning a list. You need to loop/iterate over that list (word). You can accomplish it in the following manner -

data = ["Great price on the dewalt saw", "cool deal, love it", "nice find", "definitely going to buy"]
words = {'price': ['price', 'compare', '$', 'percent', 'money']}

for d in data:
    for word in words.values():
        for s in word :
            if s in d:
                print('Results:')
                print(d)

The above code will find if any string in array of values(that is - any of list from words.values()) in dictionary words is a part of any string in data or not.

Hope it helps !

answered Jun 4, 2020 at 19:16

Abhishek Bhagate

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g.d.d.c · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-04 19:16:17Z

2

The issue you have here is that you have a list as a value, so your call to words.values() returns a list that contains another list internally. You could change that to for word in words['price'] if you will only ever have a price key, or you could change it like so:

>>> words = {'price': ['price', 'compare', '$', 'percent', 'money']}
>>> [word for wordlist in words.values() for word in wordlist]
['price', 'compare', '$', 'percent', 'money']

answered Jun 4, 2020 at 19:16

g.d.d.c

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Comments

Shakeel · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-06 15:46:12Z

May be its good idea to improve efficiency of accepted answer.

Below is the just an psuedocode to improve time complexity(based on inputs).

visited_dict = {}
results = {}
for d in data:
    for k, word in words.items():
        can_stop = False
        res_val = []
        for s in word:
            # if same words from another key is searched
            # Ex: words = {'price': ['price', 'compare', '$', 'percent', 'money'],
            #               'price2':[ 'price', 'something', 'somethingelse']}
            # In this case - get the result from visited dictionary to avoid 
            if s in visited_dict and s not in visited_dict[s]:
                # save it to results 
                # skip further steps
                continue

            if s in d and s not in res_val:
                # store it results
                res_val.append(d)
                # update visited dict
                visited_dict[s] = d
            # Save the result to final key to result map
            results[k] = res_val  # {'price': 'Great price on the dewalt saw'}

            # To avoid duplicate
            if res_val:
                break

Note: its not tested or completely implemented code. Yes, once implemented properly it may increase space complexity.

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