Finding the Index of a character within a string

Question

This may be worded incorrectly because I'm a wee beginner, but if I have a string how to I find a certain characters index like you can with the .index thing in lists.

With a list it makes sense:

 l = ["cat", "dog", "mouse"]

 animal = l.index["dog"] 

will return [1], but how do I do the same thing with strings . . .

 s = "mouse"

 animal_letter = s.index["s"]

it says there is no attribute .index

Is there another way I can do this?

Solution

Try the string.find method.

s = "mouse"
animal_letter = s.find('s')
print animal_letter

It returns the 0-based index (0 is the first character of the string) or -1 if the pattern is not found.

>>> "hello".find('h')
0
>>> "hello".find('o')
4
>>> "hello".find("darkside")
-1

Comments

[dansalmo]

animal_letter = s.index("s") don't used brackets. l.index["dog"] does not work either.

[Will P]

Can't find a definitive answer to this, is there a difference between my method and yours? s.find vs s.index?

[emkarachchi]

Does this work in scenarios like "hello".find('l') . I think it will return first l letter in the string.

[emkarachchi]

stackoverflow.com/a/11122355/7704650 hope this will work in those kind of scenarios.