Python: Find a substring in a string and returning the index of the substring

Solution 1:

There's a builtin method find on string objects.

s = "Happy Birthday"
s2 = "py"

print(s.find(s2))

Python is a "batteries included language" there's code written to do most of what you want already (whatever you want).. unless this is homework :)

find returns -1 if the string cannot be found.

Solution 2:

Ideally you would use str.find or str.index like demented hedgehog said. But you said you can't ...

Your problem is your code searches only for the first character of your search string which(the first one) is at index 2.

You are basically saying if char[0] is in s, increment index until ch == char[0] which returned 3 when I tested it but it was still wrong. Here's a way to do it.

def find_str(s, char):
    index = 0

    if char in s:
        c = char[0]
        for ch in s:
            if ch == c:
                if s[index:index+len(char)] == char:
                    return index

            index += 1

    return -1

print(find_str("Happy birthday", "py"))
print(find_str("Happy birthday", "rth"))
print(find_str("Happy birthday", "rh"))

It produced the following output:

3
8
-1