I want to test if certain characters are in a line of text. The condition is simple but characters to be tested are many.
Currently I am using \ for easy viewing, but it feels clumsy. What's the way to make the lines look nicer?
text = "Tel+971-2526-821 Fax:+971-2526-821"
if "971" in text or \
"(84)" in text or \
"+66" in text or \
"(452)" in text or \
"19 " in text:
print "foreign"
Why don't extract the phone numbers from the string and do your tests
text = "Tel:+971-2526-821 Fax:+971-2526-821"
tel, fax = text.split()
tel_prefix, *_ = tel.split(':')[-1].split('-')
fax_prefix, *_ = fax.split(':')[-1].split('-')
if tel_prefix in ("971", "(84)"):
print("Foreigner")
for python 2.x
tel_prefix = tel.split(':')[-1].split('-')[0]
fax_prefix = fax.split(':')[-1].split('-')[0]
Enlightened by @Patrick Haugh in the comment. We can do:
text = "Tel+971-2526-821 Fax:+971-2526-821"
if any(x in text for x in ("971", "(84)", "+66", "(452)", "19 ")):
print "foreign"
You can use any builtin function to check if any one of the token exists in the text. If you would like to check if all the token exists in the string you can replace the below any with all function. Cheers!
text = 'Hello your number is 19 '
tokens = ('971', '(84)', '+66', '(452)', '19 ')
if any(token in text for token in tokens):
print('Foriegn')
Output:
Foriegn
Existing comments mention that you can't really have multiple or statements like you intend, but using generators/comprehensions and the any() function you are able to come up with a serviceable option, such as the snippet if any(x in text for x in ('971', '(84)', '+66', '(452)', '19 ')): that @Patrick Haugh recommended.
I would recommend using regular expressions instead as a more versatile and efficient way of solving the problem. You could either generate the pattern dynamically, or for the purpose of this problem, the following snippet would work (don't forget to escape parentheses):
import re
text = 'Tel:+971-2526-821 Fax:+971-2526-821'
pattern = u'(971|\(84\)|66|\(452\)|19)'
prog = re.compile(pattern)
if prog.search(text):
print 'foreign'
If you are searching many lines of text or large bodies of text for multiple possible substrings, this approach will be faster and more reusable. You only have to compile prog once, and then you can use it as often as you'd like.
As far as dynamic generation of a pattern is concerned, a naive implementation might do something like this:
match_list = ['971', '(84)', '66', '(452)', '19']
pattern = '|'.join(map(lambda s: s.replace('(', '\(').replace(')', '\)'), match_list)).join(['(', ')'])
The variable match_list could then be updated and modified as needed. There is a slight inefficiency in running two passes of replace(), and @Andrew Clark has a good trick for fixing that here, but I don't want this answer to be too long and cumbersome.
You can construct a lambda function that checks if a value is in the text, and then map this function to all of the values:
text = "Tel:+971-2526-821 Fax:+971-2526-821"
print any(map((lambda x: x in text), ["971", "(84)", "+66", "(452)", "19 "]))
The result is True, which means at least one of the values is in text.
