Fastest way to search a list in python

Question

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 representa

Answer 1

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 of a value.

Don't use a list, use a set() instead. It has exactly the properties you want, including a blazing fast in test.

I've seen speedups of 20x and higher in places (mostly heavy number crunching) where one list was changed for a set.