Is there a NumPy function to return the first index of something in an array?

Yes, given an array, array, and a value, item to search for, you can use np.where as:

itemindex = numpy.where(array == item)

The result is a tuple with first all the row indices, then all the column indices.

For example, if an array is two dimensions and it contained your item at two locations then

array[itemindex[0][0]][itemindex[1][0]]

would be equal to your item and so would be:

array[itemindex[0][1]][itemindex[1][1]]

If you need the index of the first occurrence of only one value, you can use nonzero (or where, which amounts to the same thing in this case):

>>> t = array([1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 8, 3, 8, 8])
>>> nonzero(t == 8)
(array([6, 8, 9]),)
>>> nonzero(t == 8)[0][0]
6

If you need the first index of each of many values, you could obviously do the same as above repeatedly, but there is a trick that may be faster. The following finds the indices of the first element of each subsequence:

>>> nonzero(r_[1, diff(t)[:-1]])
(array([0, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8]),)

Notice that it finds the beginning of both subsequence of 3s and both subsequences of 8s:

[1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 8, 3, 8, 8]

So it's slightly different than finding the first occurrence of each value. In your program, you may be able to work with a sorted version of t to get what you want:

>>> st = sorted(t)
>>> nonzero(r_[1, diff(st)[:-1]])
(array([0, 3, 5, 7]),)

You can also convert a NumPy array to list in the air and get its index. For example,

l = [1,2,3,4,5] # Python list
a = numpy.array(l) # NumPy array
i = a.tolist().index(2) # i will return index of 2
print i

It will print 1.

Just to add a very performant and handy numba alternative based on np.ndenumerate to find the first index:

from numba import njit
import numpy as np

@njit
def index(array, item):
    for idx, val in np.ndenumerate(array):
        if val == item:
            return idx
    # If no item was found return None, other return types might be a problem due to
    # numbas type inference.

This is pretty fast and deals naturally with multidimensional arrays:

>>> arr1 = np.ones((100, 100, 100))
>>> arr1[2, 2, 2] = 2

>>> index(arr1, 2)
(2, 2, 2)

>>> arr2 = np.ones(20)
>>> arr2[5] = 2

>>> index(arr2, 2)
(5,)

This can be much faster (because it's short-circuiting the operation) than any approach using np.where or np.nonzero.

However np.argwhere could also deal gracefully with multidimensional arrays (you would need to manually cast it to a tuple and it's not short-circuited) but it would fail if no match is found:

>>> tuple(np.argwhere(arr1 == 2)[0])
(2, 2, 2)
>>> tuple(np.argwhere(arr2 == 2)[0])
(5,)