Check for key in dict returning false even though the key exists

Question

I've this function:

def step_list_kafka_topics(context):
    topics = context.kafka.list_kafka_topics()
    if 'my-topic-1' in topics:
        print('TRUE: {}'.format(topics))
    else:
        print('FALSE {}'.format(topics))

This is the response I get:

FALSE {b'my-topic-1': None, b'my-topic-2': None, b'my-topic-3': None}

I also tried if 'my-topic-1' in topics.keys() but got the same result.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

As said in the comments, this happens because your keys are bytes not str . So, one way to fix that is to decode them back to string like the following:

def step_list_kafka_topics(context):
    topics = context.kafka.list_kafka_topics()
    topics = {key.decode("utf-8") for key in topics}  #<-- just add this
    if 'my-topic-1' in topics:
        print('TRUE: {}'.format(topics))
    else:
        print('FALSE {}'.format(topics))
print()