Check against the store itself; they .keys()
returns a string dictionary of the exact keys.
In [1]: store = pd.HDFStore('test.h5',mode='w')
In [2]: store['foo'] = DataFrame(np.random.randn(10,2))
In [3]: store['bar'] = DataFrame(np.random.randn(10,2))
In [4]: store
Out[4]:
<class 'pandas.io.pytables.HDFStore'>
File path: test.h5
/bar frame (shape->[10,2])
/foo frame (shape->[10,2])
In [5]: 'bar' in store
Out[5]: True
In [6]: 'foo' in store
Out[6]: True
In [7]: '/foo' in store
Out[7]: True
In [8]: 'bah' in store
Out[8]: False