Summary
This chapter covers how to locate the first occurrence of a substring in a string using the `find()` method, returning its index or -1 if the substring isn’t found.

General domain of usage
Text processing

To find the index of a specific symbol or substring in a string, Python provides the built-in `.find()` method. This method returns the index of the first occurrence of the substring. If the substring is not found, it returns -1.

```python
string.find(substring)
```
Here, string is the original text, and substring is the character or sequence you want to locate.

string = "Channel efforts to success!"
print(string.find('n'))

In the string `"Channel efforts to success!"`, the first `'n'` appears at index 3. So, the `find()` method returns 3.

If the character were not found, for example, `string.find('z')`, the result would be -1.

import unittest
import sys
from io import StringIO


class TestUserCode(unittest.TestCase):
    def _test_variable_equals_string(self, var_name, expected):
        import user_code
        if not hasattr(user_code, var_name):
            return (False, f"Expected '{var_name}' variable to be defined.")
        var = getattr(user_code, var_name)
        if var != expected:
            return (False, f"Expected '{var_name}' to equal '{expected}', but got '{var}'.")
        return (True, f'The variable {var_name} equals "{expected}"')

    def test_p(self):
        passed, result_text = self._test_variable_equals_string(
            'p', 15)
        self._testMethodName = result_text
        self.assertTrue(passed, result_text)

    def test_y(self):
        passed, result_text = self._test_variable_equals_string(
            'y', 5)
        self._testMethodName = result_text
        self.assertTrue(passed, result_text)

    def test_r(self):
        passed, result_text = self._test_variable_equals_string(
            'r', 2)
        self._testMethodName = result_text
        self.assertTrue(passed, result_text)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main()


test_main.py

A focused, beginner-friendly course on working with numbers in Python. Learn about integers, floats, arithmetic operations, type conversion, and how to avoid common pitfalls when handling numerical data.

Get the Index of the Symbol

Solution