CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonlist
PaulBarr
PaulBarr

Reputation: 949

Find the index of an item in a list that starts with a user defined input

Given a list such as:

lst = ['abc123a:01234', 'abcde123a:01234', ['gfh123a:01234', 'abc123a:01234']]

is there a way of quickly returning the index of all the items which start with a user-defined string, such as 'abc'?

Currently I can only return perfect matches using:

print lst.index('abc123a:01234')

or by doing this in a number of steps by finding all the elements that start with 'abc' saving these to a new list and searching the original list for perfect matches against these.

If the only quick way is to use regex how could I still have the flexibility of a user being able to input what the match should be?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1427

Answers (1)

sshashank124
sshashank124

Reputation: 32189

You can accomplish that using the following script/method (which I admit is quite primitive):

lst = ['abc123a:01234', 'abcde123a:01234', ['gfh123a:01234', 'abc123a:01234']]

user_in = 'abc'

def get_ind(lst, searchterm, path=None, indices=None):
    if indices is None:
        indices = []
    if path is None:
        path = []
    for index, value in enumerate(lst):
        if isinstance(value, list):
            get_ind(value, searchterm, path + [index], indices)
        elif value.startswith(searchterm):
            indices.append(path + [index])
    return indices

new_lst = get_ind(lst, user_in)

>>> print new_lst
[[0], [1], [2, 1]]

Upvotes: 2

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