How to find the first index of any of a set of characters in a string

Question

I\'d like to find the index of the first occurrence of any “special” character in a string, like so:

>>> \"Hello world!\".index([\' \', \'!\'])
5
         


        

Answer 1

I would favour the re module as it's built in and already tested. It's also optimised for exactly this kind of thing.

>>> import re
>>> re.search(r'[ !]', 'Hello World!').start()
5

You probably want to check that a match was found though or catch the exception when it's not.

There are reasons for not using re, but I would want to see a good comment justifying the rational. Thinking that you can "do it better" is generally unnecessary, makes it harder for others to read the code and is less maintainable.