iNTERFACEWARE™ Inc.

String Searching

You can use the find function to locate a character or substring in a string:

location = "XYZ Hospital and Treatment Center"

x = location.find("t")       # x is now 8
y = location.find("Treat")   # y is now 17
z = location.find("xxx")     # z is now -1, which indicates "not found"

The first call to find returns the index of the first occurrence of t in the string. Since t is the tenth character in the string, its index is 9.

To only search part of a string, supply a start and end index when calling find:

location = "XYZ Hospital and Treatment Center"

x = location.find("t", 16, 22)   # x is now 21

The two additional parameters to find specify the start and end indexes of the search. In this example, find starts its search at index 16, which is the 17th character of the string. It stops the search at index 22.

	Note that the end index is not included in the search: location = "XYZ Hospital and Treatment Center" x = location.find("t", 16, 21) # x is now -1 In this string, t is at index 21, but is not included in the search; find returns -1.

The rfind function is similar to find, except that it returns the index of the last occurrence of a character or substring in a string:

location = "XYZ Hospital and Treatment Center"

x = location.rfind("i")   # x is now 8