Python – Check if Set is a Superset

In this tutorial, we will look at how to check whether a set in Python is a superset of another set with the help of some examples.

What is a superset?

Let’s say we have two sets, A and B. Now, if all the elements of set A are present in set B then A is said to be a subset of B, and B is called the superset of A. Here’s an example –

You can see that set B contains all the elements of set A and thus B is a superset of A and A is a subset of B.

Check if a set is a superset of another set in Python

The Python set data structure comes with a number of built-in functions to accomplish common set operations like union, intersection, difference, etc. You can use the Python set issuperset() function to check whether a set is a superset of another set. The following is the syntax:

# check if a is a superset of b
a.issuperset(b)

We call the issuperset() function from set a and pass the set b as an argument to check whether set a is a superset of set b. It returns a boolean value. Let’s look at an example.

# create two sets
a = {1, 2, 3, 4}
b = {1, 2, 3}
# check if a is superset of b
a.issuperset(b)

Output:

True

We get True as the output since a contains all the elements from set b and hence is a superset of set b. Let’s look at another example.

# create two sets
a = {1, 2}
b = {1, 2, 3}
# check if a is superset of b
a.issuperset(b)

Output:

False

Here we get False as the output since a does not contain all the elements from set b and hence it’s not a superset of set b.

Alternatively, you can use the >= operator to check if a set is a superset of another set. For example,

# create two sets
a = {1, 2, 3, 4}
b = {1, 2, 3}
# check if a is superset of b
a >= b

Output:

True

We get the same result as we did with the set issuperset() function.

You might also be interested in –

• Python – Get Union of Two or more Sets
• Python – Intersection of two or more Sets
• Set Difference in Python – With Examples