Does Go have "if x in" construct similar to Python?

This is quote from the book "Programming in Go: Creating Applications for the 21st Century":

Using a simple linear search like this is the only option for unsorted data and is fine for small slices (up to hundreds of items). But for larger slices—especially if we are performing searches repeatedly—the linear search is very inefficient, on average requiring half the items to be compared each time.

Go provides a sort.Search() method which uses the binary search algorithm: This requires the comparison of only log2(n) items (where n is the number of items) each time. To put this in perspective, a linear search of 1000000 items requires 500000 comparisons on average, with a worst case of 1000000 comparisons; a binary search needs at most 20 comparisons, even in the worst case.

files := []string{"Test.conf", "util.go", "Makefile", "misc.go", "main.go"}
target := "Makefile"
sort.Strings(files)
i := sort.Search(len(files),
    func(i int) bool { return files[i] >= target })
if i < len(files) && files[i] == target {
    fmt.Printf("found \"%s\" at files[%d]\n", files[i], i)
}

https://play.golang.org/p/UIndYQ8FeW

There is no built-in operator to do it in Go. You need to iterate over the array. You can write your own function to do it, like this:

func stringInSlice(a string, list []string) bool {
    for _, b := range list {
        if b == a {
            return true
        }
    }
    return false
}

Or in Go 1.18 or newer, you can use slices.Contains (from golang.org/x/exp/slices).

If you want to be able to check for membership without iterating over the whole list, you need to use a map instead of an array or slice, like this:

visitedURL := map[string]bool {
    "http://www.google.com": true,
    "https://paypal.com": true,
}
if visitedURL[thisSite] {
    fmt.Println("Already been here.")
}

Another solution if the list contains static values.

eg: checking for a valid value from a list of valid values:

func IsValidCategory(category string) bool {
    switch category {
    case
        "auto",
        "news",
        "sport",
        "music":
        return true
    }
    return false
}