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

Not as optimized as Padraic Cunningham's solution, but still a one liner:

string = "Hello world!"
specials = [' ', '!', 'x']
min(map(lambda x: (string.index(x) if (x in string) else len(string)), specials))