Find the index of the n’th item in a list

The answer from @Taymon using list.index was great.

FWIW, here’s a functional approach using the itertools module. It works with any iterable input, not just lists:

>>> from itertools import compress, count, imap, islice
>>> from functools import partial
>>> from operator import eq

>>> def nth_item(n, item, iterable):
        indicies = compress(count(), imap(partial(eq, item), iterable))
        return next(islice(indicies, n, None), -1)

The example is nice because it shows off how to effectively combine Python’s functional toolset. Note, that once the pipeline is set-up, there are no trips around Python’s eval loop — everything gets done at C speed, with a tiny memory footprint, with lazy evaluation, with no variable assignments, and with separately testable components. IOW, it is everything functional programmers dream about 🙂

Sample run:

>>> x = [False,True,True,False,True,False,True,False,False,False,True,False,True]
>>> nth_item(50, True, x)
-1
>>> nth_item(0, True, x)
1
>>> nth_item(1, True, x)
2
>>> nth_item(2, True, x)
4
>>> nth_item(3, True, x)
6