[Numpy-discussion] Finding values in an array

[Stephan Hoyer]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 10:15 PM, Alexander Belopolsky <ndarray at mac.com>
wrote:

> I probably miss something very basic, but how given two arrays a and b,
> can I find positions in a where elements of b are located?  If a were
> sorted, I could use searchsorted, but I don't want to get valid positions
> for elements that are not in a.  In my case, a has unique elements, but in
> the general case I would accept the first match.  In other words, I am
> looking for an array analog of list.index() method.
>

I don't know an easy solution to this problem in pure numpy, but if you
could do this pretty easily (and quite efficiently) if you are willing to
use pandas. Something like:

locs = pd.Index(a).get_indexer(b)

Note that -1 is used to denote a non-match, and get_indexer will raise if
the match is non-unique instead of returning the first element. If your
array is not 1d, you can still make this work but you'll need to use
np.ravel and np.unravel_index.

Actually, you may find that putting your data into pandas data structures
is a good solution, since pandas is designed to make exactly these sort of
alignment operations easy (and automatic).

I suppose the simplest solution to this problem would be to convert your
data into a list and use list.index() repeatedly (or you could even write
it yourself in a few lines), but I'd guess that was never implemented for
ndarrays because it's rather slow -- better to use a hash-table like a dict
or pandas.Index for repeated lookups.
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