Python. Compare list of words to list of letters

Question

I have a list

stimuli_words = ["red","bird","ocean"]

and another list

stimuli_letters = ['b','i','r','d','r','e','d','o','c','e','a','n']

Is there a way to compare the second list to the first and return matched words? Order of words doesn't matter, but within-word letters should be in the right order.

Answer 1

You can do this:

stimuli_words = ["red","bird","ocean"]
stimuli_letters = ['b','i','r','d','r','e','d','o','c','e','a','n']
stimuli_string = ''.join(stimuli_letters)  # This becomes 'birdredocean'

for word in stimuli_words:
    if word in stimuli_string:
        print(word)
        # Do something else

Where basically first you create a string from the chars in stimuli_letters and then you search for each word in stimuli_words inside the string.

Of course this only works if the chars are in order in the second list. Otherwise it becomes exponentially complex.