How to find out element position in slice?

Question

How does one determine the position of an element present in slice?

I need something like the following:

type intSlice []int

func (slice intSlice) pos(value int) int {
    for p, v := range slice {
        if (v == value) {
            return p
        }
    }
    return -1
}

Answer 1

Sorry, there's no generic library function to do this. Go doesn't have a straight forward way of writing a function that can operate on any slice.

Your function works, although it would be a little better if you wrote it using range.

If you happen to have a byte slice, there is bytes.IndexByte.

Answer 2

You can create generic function in idiomatic go way:

func SliceIndex(limit int, predicate func(i int) bool) int {
    for i := 0; i < limit; i++ {
        if predicate(i) {
            return i
        }
    }
    return -1
}

And usage:

xs := []int{2, 4, 6, 8}
ys := []string{"C", "B", "K", "A"}
fmt.Println(
    SliceIndex(len(xs), func(i int) bool { return xs[i] == 5 }),
    SliceIndex(len(xs), func(i int) bool { return xs[i] == 6 }),
    SliceIndex(len(ys), func(i int) bool { return ys[i] == "Z" }),
    SliceIndex(len(ys), func(i int) bool { return ys[i] == "A" }))

Answer 3

You could write a function;

func indexOf(element string, data []string) (int) {
   for k, v := range data {
       if element == v {
           return k
       }
   }
   return -1    //not found.
}

This returns the index of a character/string if it matches the element. If its not found, returns a -1.

Answer 4

There is no library function for that. You have to code by your own.

Answer 5

Another option is to sort the slice using the sort package, then search for the thing you are looking for:

package main

import (
    "sort"
    "log"
    )

var ints = [...]int{74, 59, 238, -784, 9845, 959, 905, 0, 0, 42, 7586, -5467984, 7586}

func main() {
        data := ints
        a := sort.IntSlice(data[0:])
        sort.Sort(a)
        pos := sort.SearchInts(a, -784)
        log.Println("Sorted: ", a)
        log.Println("Found at index ", pos)
}

prints

2009/11/10 23:00:00 Sorted:  [-5467984 -784 0 0 42 59 74 238 905 959 7586 7586 9845]
2009/11/10 23:00:00 Found at index  1

This works for the basic types and you can always implement the sort interface for your own type if you need to work on a slice of other things. See http://golang.org/pkg/sort

Depends on what you are doing though.

Answer 6

func index(slice []string, item string) int {
    for i, _ := range slice {
        if slice[i] == item {
            return i
        }
    }
    return -1
}