OK, I'm going to take a shot at this. If what I'm understanding is correct, a dictionary might help. But that would depend on the format of the original sequence. If you have a list:
Lst1 = ['cow', 'pig', 'chicken', 'poultry', 'beef', 'pork'] Then you could: Lst1.index('chicken') And get 2, because the list starts with 0, not 1, as the first index. Or this: >>> for i in Lst1: if i == 'chicken': print Lst1.index(i) if i == 'poultry': print Lst1.index(i) 2 3 Now, Kent or Alan and perhaps others will have a much more sophisticated way of doing this same problem. I'm still not exactly sure what it is you are looking for, because there isn't enough information for me to really get a grasp on your problem. My response is a simple list structure that has simple operations. Hope it helps :) T -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lauren Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 11:35 AM To: tutor@python.org Subject: [Tutor] Finding all locations of a sequence Ok, please bear with me, I'm very new to programming and python. And my question is rather...convoluted. I have a bunch of sequences (about 4100 or so), and want to know where they are in a very, very large string of letters. But wait, there's more. Some of these sequences match to more than 'word' (for example...to be consistent with later, chicken could match to poultry or chicken). example of what I want to do (on a much smaller scale): Say I have chicken and I want to know where it occurs in a string of words, but I want it to match to both chicken and poultry and have the output of: chicken (locations of chicken and poultry in the string) or something like that. The string I'm dealing with is really large, so whatever will get through it the fastest is ideal for me. I hope this all makes sense... If it's possible to have pseudocode that would be helpful. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor