Using any() and all() to check if a list contains one set of values or another

Generally speaking:

all and any are functions that take some iterable and return True, if

• in the case of all, no values in the iterable are falsy;
• in the case of any, at least one value is truthy.

A value x is falsy iff bool(x) == False.
A value x is truthy iff bool(x) == True.

Any non-boolean elements in the iterable are perfectly acceptable — bool(x) maps, or coerces, any x according to these rules:

• 0, 0.0, None, [], (), [], set(), and other empty collections are mapped to False
• all other values are mapped to True.

The docstring for bool uses the terms ‘true”https://stackoverflow.com/”false’ for ‘truthy”https://stackoverflow.com/”falsy’, and True/False for the concrete boolean values.

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In your specific code samples:

You’ve slightly misunderstood how these functions work. The following does something completely different from what you thought:

if any(foobars) == big_foobar:

…because any(foobars) would first be evaluated to either True or False, and then that boolean value would be compared to big_foobar, which generally always gives you False (unless big_foobar coincidentally happened to be the same boolean value).

Note: the iterable can be a list, but it can also be a generator or a generator expression (≈ lazily evaluated/generated list), or any other iterator.

What you want instead is:

if any(x == big_foobar for x in foobars):

which basically first constructs an iterable that yields a sequence of booleans—for each item in foobars, it compares the item to the value held by big_foobar, and (lazily) emits the resulting boolean into the resulting sequence of booleans:

tmp = (x == big_foobar for x in foobars)

then any walks over all items in tmp and returns True as soon as it finds the first truthy element. It’s as if you did the following:

In [1]: foobars = ['big', 'small', 'medium', 'nice', 'ugly']                                        

In [2]: big_foobar="big"                                                                          

In [3]: any(['big' == big_foobar, 'small' == big_foobar, 'medium' == big_foobar, 'nice' == big_foobar, 'ugly' == big_foobar])        
Out[3]: True

Note: As DSM pointed out, any(x == y for x in xs) is equivalent to y in xs but the latter is more readable, quicker to write and runs faster.

Some examples:

In [1]: any(x > 5 for x in range(4))
Out[1]: False

In [2]: all(isinstance(x, int) for x in range(10))
Out[2]: True

In [3]: any(x == 'Erik' for x in ['Erik', 'John', 'Jane', 'Jim'])
Out[3]: True

In [4]: all([True, True, True, False, True])
Out[4]: False

See also: http://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#all