Not quite sure about the function name. This is not talking to me what it's doing. Maybe _check_contains() or _check_in_list()?

It checks that it's a valid enumeration value, though I agree it's not a great name.

check_in_list looks backwards (btw, the reason for the **kwargs API is not to be able to squeeze multiple checks in a single call, but because that looks less bad (IMO) than _check_enum("foo", foo, [...])) and check_contains doesn't really convey the right idea to me (yes, strictly speaking, it's a containment check, but I think of it more as a validity check).

Anyways I don't feel very strongly about it but I'll wait until another reviewer chimes in so that we can agree on a name -- even though it's just a sed replace, I also need to realign the line continuations under them and I'm too lazy to do this twice.

We have to bring in the name, the values and the allowed values somehow. I don't really have a good solution either. So just brainstorming:

Starting from:

cbook._check_enum(['tick1', 'tick2', 'grid'], which=which)

It get's a bit better with kwargs, but also more verbose:

cbook._check_param('which', value=which, allowed_values=['tick1', 'tick2', 'grid'])

rcsetup.py does something similar with ValidateInStrings:

ValidateInStrings('which', ['tick1', 'tick2', 'grid'])(which)

Similarly, one could some factory function:

cbook._arg('which', ['tick1', 'tick2', 'grid']).validate(which)
# or
cbook._checker('which', ['tick1', 'tick2', 'grid']).check(which)

That's a bit more clear with respect to the actual action and it's target, at the cost of a slightly more complex implementation.

Alternatively one could define a namedtuple('Param', 'name supported_vals') and

cbook._check_param(which, Param('which', ['tick1', 'tick2', 'grid']))

If we're really going that route, I'd rather keep the argument and its name together (_checker([...])("foo", foo)) but that's quite close to overengineering it IMO.

Well, maybe _check_enum("foo", foo, [...]) isn't too bad after all.

Even though this is just internal, I would like an explanatory example in the docstring because the kwarg usage is a bit special. Maybe even with a note that you'll usually do _check_in_list(values, param=param).

In cases below you don't use the parameter name but the function name, e.g.

    def set_default_alignment(self, d):
        if d not in ["left", "right", "top", "bottom"]:
        cbook._check_in_list(["left", "right", "top", "bottom"],
            raise ValueError(
                             default_alignment=d)

default_alignment=d vs. s=s. Not terribly important but it would be good to decide on one way or the other and stick to it.

I decided to always go with the parameter name. (Neither solution is always great, but heh, you can see the function name in the traceback anyways.)