Find the first non-repeated character in a string

Question

I read of a job interview question to write some code for the following:

Write an efficient function to find the first nonrepeated character in a st

Answer 1

In [1033]: def firstNonRep(word):
   ......:     c = collections.Counter(word)
   ......:     for char in word:
   ......:         if c[char] == 1:
   ......:             return char
   ......:         

In [1034]: word="googlethis"

In [1035]: firstNonRep(word)
Out[1035]: 'l'

EDIT: If you want to implement the same thing without using helpers like Counter:

def firstNonRep(word):
    count = {}
    for c in word:
        if c not in count:
            count[c] = 0
        count[c] += 1
    for c in word:
        if count[c] == 1:
            return c