get index of character in python list

Question

What would be the best way to find the index of a specified character in a list containing multiple characters?

Answer 1

Probably the index method?

a = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"]
print a.index("c")

Answer 2

>>> ['a', 'b'].index('b')
1

If the list is already sorted, you can of course do better than linear search.

Answer 3

As suggested by others, you can use index. Other than that you can use enumerate to get both the index as well as the character

for position,char in enumerate(['a','b','c','d']):
    if char=='b':
        print position