I'm also going to assume that you mean "list" when you say "array." Sven Marnach's solution is good. If you are going to be doing repeated checks on the list, then it might be worth converting it to a set or frozenset, which can be faster for each check. Assuming your list of strs is called subjects
:
subject_set = frozenset(subjects)
if query in subject_set:
# whatever