Checking for Membership Using Python's "in" and "not in" Operators

Python’s in and not in operators allow you to quickly check if a given value is or isn’t part of a collection of values. This type of check is generally known as a membership test in Python. Therefore, these operators are known as membership operators.

By the end of this video course, you’ll understand that:

  • The in operator in Python is a membership operator used to check if a value is part of a collection.
  • You can write not in in Python to check if a value is absent from a collection.
  • Python’s membership operators work with several data types like lists, tuples, ranges, and dictionaries.
  • You can use operator.contains() as a function equivalent to the in operator for membership testing.
  • You can support in and not in in custom classes by implementing methods like .__contains__(), .__iter__(), or .__getitem__().

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About Martin Breuss

Martin likes automation, goofy jokes, and snakes, all of which fit into the Python community. He enjoys learning and exploring and is up for talking about it, too. He writes and records content for Real Python and CodingNomads.

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