[Numpy-discussion] Proposal: np.search() to complement np.searchsorted()

[Eric Wieser]

I don’t think that np.search is really solving the same problem as
find_first would.

IMO, we should solve that problem with an argfirst(bool_array, axis=0,
keepdims=False) -> intp function, with almost the same semantics as argmax,
but special-casing an array of Falses, to return bool_array.shape[axis].

Eric
​

On Tue, 9 May 2017 at 18:39 Stephan Hoyer <shoyer at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 9:46 AM, Martin Spacek <numpy at mspacek.mm.st> wrote:
>
>> Looking at my own habits and uses, it seems to me that finding the
>> indices of matching values of one array in another is a more common use
>> case than finding insertion indices of one array into another sorted array.
>> So, I propose that np.search(), or something like it, could be even more
>> useful than np.searchsorted().
>>
>
> The current version of this PR only returns the indices of the *first*
> match (rather than all matches), which is an important detail. I would
> strongly consider including that detail in the name (e.g., by calling this
> "find_first" rather than "search"), because my naive expectation for a
> method called "search" is to find all matches.
>
> In any case, I agree that this functionality would be welcome. Getting the
> details right for a high performance solution is tricky, and there is
> strong evidence of interest given the 200+ upvotes on this StackOverflow
> question:
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432112/is-there-a-numpy-function-to-return-the-first-index-of-something-in-an-array
>
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