How to check if a list partially matches one of the lists in a list of lists?

Question

I would like to check if a list is a sublist if a bigger list of lists. It would be easy to check if it is just in the list of lists but a partial match is also acceptable.

In this example it should return True:

list = [1,4,9]
listoflists = [[1,2,3], [1,3,4,7,9], [6,8]]

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Below example works by:

• Iterating over each sublist within lol
• Generating a list representing the intersection of the current sublist and lol (stored each iteration as temp)
• Comparing sorted() versions of temp and l, returning True if a match is found.
• Returning False if all sublists are checked with no match found

The function will return True if either a full match is found between elements of l and any sublist of lol, or in "partial match" cases in which all elements of l are present within any sublist of lol.

def compare_sublists(l, lol):
    for sublist in lol:
        temp = [i for i in sublist if i in l]
        if sorted(temp) == sorted(l):
            return True
    return False

Answer 2

The following should work:

any([all([list.count(i)<=x.count(i) for i in list]) for x in listoflists])

Answer 3

from itertools import repeat

def is_sub_list(a, b):
    if [] in (a, b):
        return False
    c = set(a)
    d = map(set, b)
    return True if any(map(set.issubset, repeat(c), d)) else False

lst1 = [1, 3, 9]
lst2 = [1, 3, 8]
lst_of_lst = [[1, 2, 3], [1, 3, 4, 7, 9], [6, 8]]

print(is_sub_list(lst1, lst_of_lst))  # True
print(is_sub_list(lst2, lst_of_lst))  # False