Using arrays with the IF conditional

Question

What Im trying to do is test the value of an variable and see if it exists inside an array. So as a simple example I would do something like this with AppleScript
set excludeList to {"A", "B"}
set theItem to "C"
if theItem is not in excludeList then
display dialog theItem
end if
So how would I replicate that in a shell script. Currently I would just use a long if statement like this
#!/bin/sh
theItem="C"
if [ $theItem != "A" ] && [ $theItem != "B" ]
then
echo $theItem
fi
But I feel there has to be a better way. I suppose I could put the if in a loop and go through the array, but I'm wondering if there is a route more similar to my basic applescript example.
Thanks!
Message was edited by: James Nierodzik because I can't type

Answer 1

A little follow up: If anyone's using the script I referred to above, I've tweaked the style to override line height and simulate an 80 column display. So the above now looks like:
<pre style="padding-left: .75ex; padding-top: .25em; padding-bottom: .25em; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em; margin-left: 1ex; max-width: 80ex; overflow: auto; font-size: 9px; font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; color: #222; background: #ddd; line-height: normal">#!/bin/sh
theItem="C"
if [ $theItem != "A" ] && [ $theItem != "B" ]
then
echo $theItem
fi</pre>
Cole