Index of duplicates items in a python list

You want to pass in the optional second parameter to index, the location where you want index to start looking. After you find each match, reset this parameter to the location just after the match that was found.

def list_duplicates_of(seq,item):
    start_at = -1
    locs = []
    while True:
        try:
            loc = seq.index(item,start_at+1)
        except ValueError:
            break
        else:
            locs.append(loc)
            start_at = loc
    return locs

source = "ABABDBAAEDSBQEWBAFLSAFB"
print(list_duplicates_of(source, 'B'))

Prints:

[1, 3, 5, 11, 15, 22]

You can find all the duplicates at once in a single pass through source, by using a defaultdict to keep a list of all seen locations for any item, and returning those items that were seen more than once.

from collections import defaultdict

def list_duplicates(seq):
    tally = defaultdict(list)
    for i,item in enumerate(seq):
        tally[item].append(i)
    return ((key,locs) for key,locs in tally.items() 
                            if len(locs)>1)

for dup in sorted(list_duplicates(source)):
    print(dup)

Prints:

('A', [0, 2, 6, 7, 16, 20])
('B', [1, 3, 5, 11, 15, 22])
('D', [4, 9])
('E', [8, 13])
('F', [17, 21])
('S', [10, 19])

If you want to do repeated testing for various keys against the same source, you can use functools.partial to create a new function variable, using a “partially complete” argument list, that is, specifying the seq, but omitting the item to search for:

from functools import partial
dups_in_source = partial(list_duplicates_of, source)

for c in "ABDEFS":
    print(c, dups_in_source(c))

Prints:

A [0, 2, 6, 7, 16, 20]
B [1, 3, 5, 11, 15, 22]
D [4, 9]
E [8, 13]
F [17, 21]
S [10, 19]