How to retrieve partial matches from a list of strings? [duplicate]

Answer 1

A simple, direct answer:

test_list = ['one', 'two','threefour']
r = [s for s in test_list if s.startswith('three')]
print(r[0] if r else 'nomatch')

Result:

threefour

Not sure what you want to do in the non-matching case. r[0] is exactly what you asked for if there is a match, but it's undefined if there is no match. The print deals with this, but you may want to do so differently.