Finding a substring within a list in Python

All the answers work but they always traverse the whole list. If I understand your question, you only need the first match. So you don't have to consider the rest of the list if you found your first match:

mylist = ['abc123', 'def456', 'ghi789']
sub = 'abc'
next((s for s in mylist if sub in s), None) # returns 'abc123'

If the match is at the end of the list or for very small lists, it doesn't make a difference, but consider this example:

import timeit

mylist = ['abc123'] + ['xyz123']*1000
sub = 'abc'

timeit.timeit('[s for s in mylist if sub in s]', setup='from __main__ import mylist, sub', number=100000)
# for me 7.949463844299316 with Python 2.7, 8.568840944994008 with Python 3.4
timeit.timeit('next((s for s in mylist if sub in s), None)', setup='from __main__ import mylist, sub', number=100000) 
# for me 0.12696599960327148 with Python 2.7, 0.09955992100003641 with Python 3.4

print [s for s in list if sub in s]

If you want them separated by newlines:

print "\n".join(s for s in list if sub in s)

Full example, with case insensitivity:

mylist = ['abc123', 'def456', 'ghi789', 'ABC987', 'aBc654']
sub = 'abc'

print "\n".join(s for s in mylist if sub.lower() in s.lower())