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

I think it would be better to go with the set implementation. I know for a fact that sets have O(1) lookup time. I think lists take O(n) lookup time. But even if lists are also O(1) lookup, you lose nothing with switching to sets.

Further, sets don't allow duplicate values. This will make your program slightly more memory efficient as well