Python - get position in list

Question

I am iterating over a list and I want to print out the index of the item if it meets a certain condition. How would I do this?

Example:

testlist = [1,2,3,5,3,1,2,1,6]
for item in testlist:
    if item == 1:
        print position

Answer 1

for i in xrange(len(testlist)):
  if testlist[i] == 1:
    print i

xrange instead of range as requested (see comments).

Answer 2

Use enumerate:

testlist = [1,2,3,5,3,1,2,1,6]
for position, item in enumerate(testlist):
    if item == 1:
        print position

Answer 3

If your list got large enough and you only expected to find the value in a sparse number of indices, consider that this code could execute much faster because you don't have to iterate every value in the list.

lookingFor = 1
i = 0
index = 0
try:
  while i < len(testlist):
    index = testlist.index(lookingFor,i)
    i = index + 1
    print index
except ValueError: #testlist.index() cannot find lookingFor
  pass

If you expect to find the value a lot you should probably just append "index" to a list and print the list at the end to save time per iteration.

Answer 4

Hmmm. There was an answer with a list comprehension here, but it's disappeared.

Here:

 [i for i,x in enumerate(testlist) if x == 1]

Example:

>>> testlist
[1, 2, 3, 5, 3, 1, 2, 1, 6]
>>> [i for i,x in enumerate(testlist) if x == 1]
[0, 5, 7]

Update:

Okay, you want a generator expression, we'll have a generator expression. Here's the list comprehension again, in a for loop:

>>> for i in [i for i,x in enumerate(testlist) if x == 1]:
...     print i
... 
0
5
7

Now we'll construct a generator...

>>> (i for i,x in enumerate(testlist) if x == 1)
<generator object at 0x6b508>
>>> for i in (i for i,x in enumerate(testlist) if x == 1):
...     print i
... 
0
5
7

and niftily enough, we can assign that to a variable, and use it from there...

>>> gen = (i for i,x in enumerate(testlist) if x == 1)
>>> for i in gen: print i
... 
0
5
7

And to think I used to write FORTRAN.

Answer 5

testlist = [1,2,3,5,3,1,2,1,6] for id, value in enumerate(testlist): if id == 1: print testlist[id]

I guess that it's exacly what you want. ;-) 'id' will be always the index of the values on the list.