How can I search an item in a list of lists?

Question

I am doing a school project about a inventory system, and I am facing some problem in programming the Search function.

Take an example:

ilist = [ [1,2,3,4,5], [6,7,8,9,10], [...], ...]

I would like to search for 1 and want the list containing 1 to display.

search = input('By user:')
for item in ilist:
  if item == search :
     print(item)

It does not work this way and I get this error:

list index out of range error

Answer 1

you have a nested list and are now checking against the list ('1' wont match with [1,2,3,4,5] )

so you have to loop over the list within the list and change input to int:

ilist = [ [1,2,3,4,5], [6,7,8,9,10]]

search = input('By user:')
for item in ilist:
    for i in item:
        if i == int(search):
            print(i)

this is building on your way of coding, could be further improved from this

Answer 2

Two problems:

1. ilist is a list of lists, and you're comparing search to each list
2. Each member in each list is of type int , while search is of type str

In short, change this:

if item == search

To this:

if int(search) in item

Answer 3

You can use in to find the element from each list

search = int(input('By user:'))
for item in ilist:
    if search in item:
        print(item)