Fastest way to search a list in python
问题 When you do something like "test" in a where a is a list does python do a sequential search on the list or does it create a hash table representation to optimize the lookup? In the application I need this for I'll be doing a lot of lookups on the list so would it be best to do something like b = set(a) and then "test" in b ? Also note that the list of values I'll have won't have duplicate data and I don't actually care about the order it's in; I just need to be able to check for the existence