Finding the index value of the smallest number in a list? [duplicate]

Question

Say I have a list of numbers [ 20, 15, 27, 30 ]

How would I return the index number of the smallest value in this list. (15) Obviously, min(lst) will return the smallest number itself, but how do I instead return it's index "1" ?

Answer 1

Since you already know how to find the minimum value, you simply feed that value to the index() function to get the index of this value in the list. I.e,

n = [20, 15, 27, 30]
n.index(min(n))

yields

1

This will return the index of the minimum value in the list. Note that if there are several minima it will return the first.

min(): With a single argument iterable, return the smallest item of a non-empty iterable (such as a string, tuple or list). With more than one argument, return the smallest of the arguments.

list.index(x): Return the index in the list of the first item whose value is x. It is an error if there is no such item.