Python find first of multiple (single character) substrings

Question

What's the most Pythonic way to find the first of multiple single character substrings (if any) in a string?

To be clear, a string can contain multiple characters of interest and I want to find the first one - any one, I don't care which & don't need to know which. I just want to know that one of those characters occurred and the first point in the string where any of them occurred (thus, clearly not a dupe of the suggested question).

endDigitPos = digitText.find(['u', ' ', ')', '}', '/*'])

Isn't doing it

I am generically parsing C code - any C code. I am actually looking for hex strings, which start with 0x; having found that, I want to find the end of the hex string, which will be a space a close bracket, a space, a u if it is unsigned, or the end of line.

digitText starts 0x and ends with one of those chars.

The code above gives

endDigitPos = digitText.find(['u', ' ', ')', '}', '/*'])
TypeError: must be str, not list

Answer 1

I don't think there's anything that does this out of the box, but it's pretty easy to implement as regex

import re

def find_many(instring, *substrings):
    pat = re.compile('|'.join([re.escape(s) for s in substrings]))
    match = pat.search(instring)
    if match is None:
        return -1
    else:
        return match.start() 

substrings = ['u', ' ', ')', '}', '/*']
find_many('aaa/*', *substrings)  #  3
find_many('aaab', *substrings)   # -1
find_many('uaaa/*', *substrings) #  0

Answer 2

No idea of whether this is "the most pythonic" way, but one option would be

index = next(i for i,c in enumerate(s) if c in {'u', ' ', ')', '}', '/'})

Note: This will raise a StopIteration in case no item is found. Adapt as needed depending on what you would like to have as the "item is not there" case.

Note2: As Patrick pointed out in the comments, this only works for single-characters, so if you need the multi-substring approach go for his proposed solution