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

from collections import defaultdict
word="googlethis"
dici=defaultdict(int)

#build up dici with counts of characters
for a in word:
    if dici[a]:
        dici[a]+=1
for a in word:
    if didic[a] < 2:
        return a

wouldn't that work?