You'd probably know about the startswith() and endswith() string methods.

>>> sentence = 'This is a sample string'

>>> sentence.startswith('This')
True
>>> sentence.startswith('is')
False

>>> sentence.endswith('ing')
True
>>> sentence.endswith('ly')
False

But did you know that you can also pass a tuple of strings?

>>> words = ['refuse', 'impossible', 'fire', 'present', 'read', 'shim']
>>> prefix = ('im', 're', 'use')

>>> [w for w in words if w.startswith(prefix)]
['refuse', 'impossible', 'read']

>>> [w for w in words if w.endswith(prefix)]
['refuse', 'fire', 'shim']

Video demo:


info See also my 100 Page Python Intro ebook.