Check if a Python list item contains a string inside another string

If you only want to check for the presence of abc in any string in the list, you could try

some_list = ['abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456']
if any("abc" in s for s in some_list):
    # whatever

If you really want to get all the items containing abc, use

matching = [s for s in some_list if "abc" in s]

Just throwing this out there: if you happen to need to match against more than one string, for example abc and def, you can combine two comprehensions as follows:

matchers = ['abc','def']
matching = [s for s in my_list if any(xs in s for xs in matchers)]

Output:

['abc-123', 'def-456', 'abc-456']

Use filter to get at the elements that have abc.

>>> lst = ['abc-123', 'def-456', 'ghi-789', 'abc-456']
>>> print filter(lambda x: 'abc' in x, lst)
['abc-123', 'abc-456']

You can also use a list comprehension.

>>> [x for x in lst if 'abc' in x]

By the way, don't use the word list as a variable name since it is already used for the list type.