The complexity of in depends entirely on what L is. e in L will become L.__contains__(e).

See this time complexity document for the complexity of several built-in types.

Here is the summary for in:

• list - Average: O(n)
• set/dict - Average: O(1), Worst: O(n)

The O(n) worst case for sets and dicts is very uncommon, but it can happen if __hash__ is implemented poorly. This only happens if everything in your set has the same hash value.

It's a combination of Boyer-Moore and Horspool.

You can view the C code here:

Fast search/count implementation, based on a mix between Boyer-Moore and Horspool, with a few more bells and whistles on the top. For some more background, see: https://web.archive.org/web/20201107074620/http://effbot.org/zone/stringlib.htm.

From the link above:

When designing the new algorithm, I used the following constraints:

• should be faster than the current brute-force algorithm for all test cases (based on real-life code), including Jim Hugunin’s worst-case test
• small setup overhead; no dynamic allocation in the fast path (O(m) for speed, O(1) for storage)
• sublinear search behaviour in good cases (O(n/m))
• no worse than the current algorithm in worst case (O(nm))
• should work well for both 8-bit strings and 16-bit or 32-bit Unicode strings (no O(σ) dependencies)
• many real-life searches should be good, very few should be worst case
• reasonably simple implementation

in does not necessarily use loops behind the scenes. For example:

r = range(100000000000)
print(333 in r)  # prints True immediately without looping

If you were to loop r it will take quite a long time, so clearly that doesn't happen.

in basically calls (behind the scenes) the object's __contains__ method. For some iterators it will in fact "loop" through everything but that's not always the case.

This example is basically the same as calling:

r.__contains__(333)

As pointed out in comments - the str objects specifically have a smarter algorithm than just plain loops, as you can see here

Also see example answer here

And see the documentation here

Because the real world scenario would probably mean that string1 can be arbitrarily long, but the characters to be removed would be a finite and small set, it will probably be much more efficient to just add up all the characters that aren't in string2. Something like this:

def removeChars (string1, string2):
    result = ''
    for char in string1:
        if char not in string2:
            result += char
    return result

This will involve looping over string1 just once, but multiple checks against string2 using in. This can be further simplified (to avoid += loop over the result):

def removeChars (string1, string2):
    return ''.join(char for char in string1 if char not in string2)

In python-3.x a range(..) is an object, it does not construct a list. If you perform member checks with an int as item, then it can do that quite fast. The algorithm is a bit complicated, since there are both positive and negative steps. You can look it up on [GitHub]. A simple algorithm with a positive step count (c > 0) for x in range(a, b, c) is something like:

x ≥ a ∧ x < b ∧ mod(x-a, c) = 0.

For a negative step count (c < 0) is is quite similar:

x ≤ a ∧ x > b ∧ mod(x-a, c) = 0.

If we consider the comparisons to be done in O(1) and calculating the modulo as well, it is an O(1) algorithm. In reality for huge numbers, it scales in the number of digits of the numbers, so it is an O(log n) algorithm.

This however only works for ints. Indeed, in case you use floats, complex, other numerical or non-numerical types, it does not perform the above calculations. It will then fall back on iterating over the range(..) object. Which of course can take considerable time. If you have a range of a million elements, it will thus iterate over all these elements and eventually reach the end of the range, and return False, or find a match, and return True. In the future, perhaps some extra functionality can be implemented for some numerical types, but one can not do this in general, since you can define your own numerical type with an equality operation that works differently.

In python-2.x, range(..) is a function that returns a list. Indeed:

>>> range(15)
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]
>>> type(range(15))
<type 'list'>

In order to check if an element is a member of a list, it will iterate over the list, and check equality for all items until it finds an element that is equal, or the list is exhausted. If we consider checking if two items are equal to be constant time, then this takes linear time O(n). In reality for huge numbers, checking if two numbers are equal, scales linear with the number of "digits", so O(log m) with m the value of that number.

python-2.x has an xrange(..) object as well, but this does not check for membership with the above demonstrated trick.