Comparing the Nth letter to Nth letters of multiple strings in python

October 3, 2022

I can’t quite figure this one out.

I have multiple five letter long strings and I want to compare each of the letters of the strings to a single string, and then to know if any of the Nth letters of the strings are equal to the Nth letter of the string I’m comparing them to, like this:

string_1 = 'ghost'
string_2 = 'media'
string_3 = 'blind'

the_word = 'shine'

if the_word[0] == string_1[0] or the_word[0] == string_2[0] or the_word[0] == string_3[0] or the_word[1] == string_1[1] or the_word[1] == string_2[1]... and so on...
  print('The Nth letter of some of the strings is equal to the Nth letter of the_word')
else:
  print('None of the letters positions correspond')

If there are multiple strings I want to compare the if statement gets very long so there must be a better way of doing this.

I would also like to know what the corresponding letters are (in this case they would be H (string_1[1] == the_word[1]), I (string_3[2] == the_word[2]) and N (string_3[3] == the_word[3])

If there are more than one corresponding letters I would like the return to be list containing all of the letters.

Also I dont need to know if the corresponding letter was the first or whatever the letters position in the word is, only if there are any (and what) corresponding letters.

I find this kind of hard to explain so sorry for possible confusion, will be happy to elaborate.

Thank you!

>Solution :

IIUC, you can get to what you want using zip –

base_strings = zip(string_1, string_2, string_3)
for cmp_pair in zip(the_word, base_strings):
    if (cmp_pair[0] in cmp_pair[1]):
        print(cmp_pair[0])

Output