Finding multiple substrings in a string without iterating over it multiple times

Question

I need to find if items from a list appear in a string, and then add the items to a different list. This code works:

data =[]
line = \'akhgvfalfhda.dhgfa.lidh         


        

Answer 1

One approach is to build a very simple regex pattern, and use re.findall() to find/extract any matched words in the string.

import re

line = 'akhgvfalfhda.dhgfa.lidhfalihflaih**Thing1**aoufgyafkugafkjhafkjhflahfklh**Thing2**dlfkhalfhafli...'
_legal = ['thing1', 'thing2', 'thing3', 'thing4']

exp = re.compile(r'|'.join(_legal), re.IGNORECASE)
exp.findall(line)

>>> ['Thing1', 'Thing2']