Finding each item of one list in another list

Hello,
I am trying to find a way to get every item of one list that appears
in another list, but would prefer not to loop through the list - I was
hoping for some thing like this:

set b to {"a", "b", "f"}
set c to {"a", "b", "c", "d", "e"}
set a to every item of b that is in c
-- result would be a is {"a", "b"}

The reason I do not want to loop is the the lists will be very long
and it takes quite a while to loop through them. If I have a table
view in X-Code with 10000 rows of data - using this:

append theDS with (contents of data cells of (data rows of theFullDS
whose ((contents of data cell 2 of it contains theFilter))))

will give me every row that contains theFilter without looping - I can
get the matching rows in a fraction of a second while looping through
every data row takes about 10 seconds. So what I want to do is
replace “theFilter” with a list so I can check to see if it meets more
than one filter - but hopefully in a statement as simple as the one
above not requiring a repeat statement.

Does anyone know if this is possilbe, and if so how to code it?

Thanks in advance for the help!

jON bEEBE
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