Is there a short contains function for lists?

The list method index will return -1 if the item is not present, and will return the index of the item in the list if it is present. Alternatively in an if statement you can do the following:

if myItem in list:
    #do things

You can also check if an element is not in a list with the following if statement:

if myItem not in list:
    #do things

In addition to what other have said, you may also be interested to know that what in does is to call the list.__contains__ method, that you can define on any class you write and can get extremely handy to use python at his full extent.  

A dumb use may be:

>>> class ContainsEverything:
    def __init__(self):
        return None
    def __contains__(self, *elem, **k):
        return True


>>> a = ContainsEverything()
>>> 3 in a
True
>>> a in a
True
>>> False in a
True
>>> False not in a
False
>>>         

Use:

if my_item in some_list:
    ...

Also, inverse operation:

if my_item not in some_list:
    ...

It works fine for lists, tuples, sets and dicts (check keys).

Note that this is an O(n) operation in lists and tuples, but an O(1) operation in sets and dicts.

I came up with this one liner recently for getting True if a list contains any number of occurrences of an item, or False if it contains no occurrences or nothing at all. Using next(...) gives this a default return value (False) and means it should run significantly faster than running the whole list comprehension.

list_does_contain = next((True for item in list_to_test if item == test_item), False)