How to find the first and last of one of several characters in a list of strings?

[bowlofred]

I like using re for this, since it can find the element and give you the index directly.

>>> mylist = ["---abcdefgh----abc--","--abcd-a--","----------abcdefghij----ab-","-abcdef---a-","----abcdefghijklm----abc--"]
>>> [re.search(r"[^-]", x).start() for x in mylist]
[3, 2, 10, 1, 4]
>>> [re.search(r"[^-]-*$", x).start() for x in mylist]
[17, 7, 25, 10, 23]