Fix Python – Getting indices of True values in a boolean list

Question 1

I have a piece of my code where I’m supposed to create a switchboard. I want to return a list of all the switches that are on. Here “on” will equal True and “off” equal False. So now I just want to return a list of all the True values and their position. This is all I have but it only return the position of the first occurrence of True (this is just a portion of my code):

self.states = [False, False, False, False, True, True, False, True, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False]

def which_switch(self):
    x = [self.states.index(i) for i in self.states if i == True]

This only returns “4”

Question 2

Use enumerate, list.index returns the index of first match found.

>>> t = [False, False, False, False, True, True, False, True, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False]
>>> [i for i, x in enumerate(t) if x]
[4, 5, 7]

For huge lists, it’d be better to use itertools.compress:

>>> from itertools import compress
>>> list(compress(xrange(len(t)), t))
[4, 5, 7]
>>> t = t*1000
>>> %timeit [i for i, x in enumerate(t) if x]
100 loops, best of 3: 2.55 ms per loop
>>> %timeit list(compress(xrange(len(t)), t))
1000 loops, best of 3: 696 µs per loop

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Answer