[Tutor] Finding the Index of a member of a Tuple

[bob]

At 08:31 PM 1/11/2006, Steve Haley wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>
>I need to do something very simple but I'm having trouble finding 
>the way to do it - at least easily.  I have created a tuple and now 
>need to find the position of individual members of that 
>tuple.  Specifically, the tuple is something like: words = ("you", 
>"me", "us", "we", "and", "so", "forth") and I need to be able to 
>name a member, for example, "us" and find what the position (index) 
>of that word is in the tuple.
>
>I would have thought there would be a simple built in function for 
>that but I just went through the built in functions in the Python 
>Library Reference and I didn't find anything.  I could probably 
>figure out how to write a while loop or something to do a sequential 
>search until I found the right member but I really believe there 
>must be an easier way and I'm just not seeing it.  You can probably 
>tell I'm just learning Python so any help would be appreciated.

Unfortunately there is no list method find. Sigh. Here's how I'd do it:

# create a dictionary with each word as key and ordinal as value
words = dict([(n,m) for m,n in enumerate(("you", "me", "us", "we", 
"and", "so", "forth"))])
words["me"] # returns 1