Finding the position of words in a string [duplicate]

Question

My Task

I am trying to find the position of words appearing in a string using regex

Code

import re

# A random string

mystr = "there not what is jake can do for you ask what you play do for spare jake".upper() 

match = re.search(r"[^a-zA-Z](jake)[^a-zA-Z]", mystr)

print match.start(1)

Output

18

Expected output

I would expect my output to contain the positions of the string jake:

5, 17

EDIT: To clarify, I'm trying to identify the position of words. I believe what I have done is found the index and am unsure how to make it work as I expect

Answer 1

To get the "ordinal" positions of search string jake in the input string use the following approach:

mystr = "there not what is jake can do for you ask what you play do for spare jake"
search_str = 'jake'

result = [i+1 for i,w in enumerate(mystr.split()) if w.lower() == search_str]
print(result)  

The output:

[5, 17]

---

• enumerate(mystr.split()) - to get enumerated object (pairs of items with their positions/indices)

• w.lower() == search_str - if a word is equal to search string