Logic operators with "in" statement

[Tim Chase]

> Here I expected to get True in the second case too, so clearly I don't
> really get how they work.

You're seeing short-circuit evaluation:

   >>> "3" or "4"  # true
   '3'
   >>> '4' or '3'  # true
   '4'
   >>> '4' in l    # false
   False
   >>> '3' or False  # true
   '3'
   >>> '4' or '42' in l  # true: same as "'4' or ('42' in l)"
   '4'
   >>> '4' or '42'
   '4'
   >>> ('4' or '42') in l # true:  same as "'4' in l"
   '4'

It just happens that sometimes you get unexpected results that 
happen to be right because of how Python handles strings/numbers 
as booleans and order-of-operations.

> What I really need is to create a sequence of "if" statements to check
> the presence of elements in a list, because some of them are mutually
> exclusive, so if for example there are both "3" and "no3" it should
> return an error.

The "in" operator only checks containment of one item, not 
multiples, so you have to manage the checking yourself.  This is 
fairly easy with the any()/all() functions added in 2.5:

   any(i in l for i in ("3", "4"))
   all(i in l for i in ("3", "4"))

For more complex containment testing, using sets will be more 
efficient and offers a richer family of batch operators 
(contains, intersection, union, difference, issubset, issuperset)

-tkc