How to find an index of the first matching element in TensorFlow

Question

I am looking for a TensorFlow way of implementing something similar to Python\'s list.index() function.

Given a matrix and a value to find, I want to know the first

Answer 1

Here is another solution to the problem, assuming there is a hit on every row.

import tensorflow as tf

val = 3
m = tf.constant([
    [0  ,   0,   val,   0, val],
    [val,   0,   val, val,   0],
    [0  , val,     0,   0,   0]])

# replace all entries in the matrix either with its column index, or out-of-index-number
match_indices = tf.where(                          # [[5, 5, 2, 5, 4],
    tf.equal(val, m),                              #  [0, 5, 2, 3, 5],
    x=tf.range(tf.shape(m)[1]) * tf.ones_like(m),  #  [5, 1, 5, 5, 5]]
    y=(tf.shape(m)[1])*tf.ones_like(m))

result = tf.reduce_min(match_indices, axis=1)

with tf.Session() as sess:
    print(sess.run(result)) # [2, 0, 1]