Testing user input against a list in python

Question

I need to test if the user input is the same as an element of a list, right now I'm doing this:

cars = ("red", "yellow", "blue")
guess = str(input())

if guess == cars[1] or guess == cars[2]:
        print("success!")

But I'm working with bigger lists and my if statement is growing a lot with all those checks, is there a way to reference multiple indexes something like:

if guess == cars[1] or cars[2]

or

if guess == cars[1,2,3]

Reading the lists docs I saw that it's impossible to reference more than one index like, I tried above and of course that sends a syntax error.

Answer 1

The simplest way is:

if guess in cars:
    ...

but if your list was huge, that would be slow. You should then store your list of cars in a set:

cars_set = set(cars)
....
if guess in cars_set:
    ...

Checking whether something is present is a set is much quicker than checking whether it's in a list (but this only becomes an issue when you have many many items, and you're doing the check several times.)

(Edit: I'm assuming that the omission of cars[0] from the code in the question is an accident. If it isn't, then use cars[1:] instead of cars.)

Answer 2

Use guess in cars to test if guess is equal to an element in cars:

cars = ("red","yellow","blue")
guess = str(input())

if guess in cars:
        print ("success!")