Check if any string in a list of strings is in a pandas row and return bool result

I want to return bool column based on a condition:

• column with sentences
• list = [‘foo’, ‘box’]
• if any from list in row -> return True, else return False

My code does not work and I can’t find the mistake:

clean_df['to_process'] = clean_df['sentence'].apply(
    lambda x: True if any(st in x for st in ['foo','box']) else False)

>Solution :

Use Series.str.contains with join list for regex OR:

L = ['foo','box']
clean_df['to_process'] = clean_df['sentence'].str.contains('|'.join(L))