Search a list with words in string as parameter in python - list

Question

I could use some advice, how to search in a list for genres with words in a string as parameter.
So if i have created a list called genre, which contains a string like:
['crime, drama,action']
I want to use this list to search for movies containing all genres or maybe just 1 of them.
I have created a big list which contains all information about the movie. An example from the list you see here:
('Saving Private Ryan (1998)', '8.5', "Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore',\n", 'action, drama, war,\n'),
So if i want to search for saving private ryan, which is a drama + action genre, but not crime, how can i then use my genre list to search for it?
Is there a way to search by something in the string?
UPDATE:
So this is what i done so far. I have tried to precess my tuple movie and use the def function.
Navn_rating = dict(zip(names1, ratings))
Actor_genre = dict(zip(actorlist, genre_list))
var = raw_input("Enter movie: ")
print "you entered ", var
for row in name_rating_actor_genre:
if var in row:
movie.append(row)
print "Movie found",movie
def process_movie(movie):
return {'title': names1, 'rating': ratings, 'actors': actorlist, 'genre': genre_list}

Answer 1

You can "search by something in the string" using in:
>>> genres = 'action, drama, war,\n'
>>> 'action' in genres
True
>>> 'drama' in genres
True
>>> 'romantic comedy' in genres
False
But note that this might not always give the result you want:
>>> 'war' in 'award-winning'
True
I think you should change your data structure. Consider making each movie a dictionary e.g.
{'title': 'Saving Private Ryan', 'year': 1998, 'rating': 8.5, 'actors': ['Tom Hanks', ...], 'genres': ['action', ...]}
then your query becomes
if 'drama' in movie.genres and 'action' in movie.genres:
You can use indexing, split and slicing to process your tuple of strings to make the values of the dictionary, e.g.:
>>> movie = ('Saving Private Ryan (1998)', '8.5', "Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore',\n", 'action, drama, war,\n')
>>> int(movie[0][-5:-1])
1998
>>> float(movie[1])
8.5
>>> movie[0][:-7]
'Saving Private Ryan'
>>> movie[2].split(",")
['Tom Hanks', ' Matt Damon', " Tom Sizemore'", '\n']
As you can see, some tidying up may be needed. You could write a function that takes the tuple as an argument and returns the corresponding dictionary:
def process_movie(movie_tuple):
# ... process the tuple here
return {'title': title, 'rating': rating, ...}
and apply this to your list of movies using map:
movies = list(map(process_movie, name_rating_actor_genre))
Edit:
You will know your function works when the following line doesn't raise any errors:
assert process_movie(('Saving Private Ryan (1998)', '8.5', "Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore',\n", 'action, drama, war,\n')) == {"title": "Saving Private Ryan", "year": 1998, "rating": 8.5, "actors": ["Tom Hanks", "Matt Damon", "Tom Sizemore"], "genres": ["action", "drama", "war"]}