Finding the index of a field with its name using arcpy

You might want to investigate the FieldMappings object, which has various methods which deal with indices.

Instead of using for loops, you can use list comprehensions, like so:

self.field_name = [field.name for field in fieldList]

It can be shortened even further, since you may not need to store fieldList at all:

self.field_name = [field.name for field in arcpy.ListFields(self.address_ref_layer1)]

This Python function will return the Index Name associated with the FeatureClass and Field Name passed in.

def getIndexName(fieldname,fc):
    indexes = arcpy.ListIndexes(fc)
    for index in indexes:
        for f in index.fields:
            if f.name.upper() == fieldname.upper():
                return index.name

I struggled to find an answer for this on the ESRI sites which is why I ended up here. The clue is the object has field.

import arcpy
from arcpy import env
FC = r'Your_FC'
indexes = arcpy.ListIndexes(FC)
    for index in indexes:
        for fieldname in index.fields:
        fieldname = fieldname.name
        indexname = index.name
        print fieldname, indexname

You can also create a function that will return the index of a field:

import arcpy
def findindex(table,fieldname):
    return [i.name for i in arcpy.ListFields(table)].index(fieldname)

Input a feature class or table and the field name:

>>>findindex(r'C:GISTest.shp','EKOSTAT')
8

Here's how to get the field index number with FieldMapping:

def get_field_index(table, fieldName):
    # Return: the index number of the fieldName in the table.
    field_map = arcpy.FieldMappings()
    field_map.addTable(table)
    field_index = field_map.findFieldMapIndex(fieldName)
    return field_index