title: fastest and elegant way to check whether a given list contains some element by regular expression
body: <p>Fastest and elegant way to check whether some element expressed by regular expression is in a given list.</p>
  
  <p>For example: 
  given a list:</p>
  
  <pre><code>newlist = ['this','thiis','thas','sada']
  regex = re.compile('th.s')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In this question: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3640359/regular-expressions-search-in-list">Regular Expressions: Search in list</a> </p>
  
  <pre><code>list(filter(regex.match,newlist))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>give me a list </p>
  
  <pre><code>['this','thas']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, I just want to return <strong>True or False</strong>. Therefore above method is not efficient since it looks through all element of newlist. Is there a way like </p>
  
  <pre><code>'this' in newlist
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>to efficiently and elegantly check whether some element expressed by regular expression is in a given list.</p>