What you want is called an associative array. In python these are called dictionaries.

Dictionaries are sometimes found in other languages as “associative memories” or “associative arrays”. Unlike sequences, which are indexed by a range of numbers, dictionaries are indexed by keys, which can be any immutable type; strings and numbers can always be keys.

myDict = {}
myDict["john"] = "johns value"
myDict["jeff"] = "jeffs value"

Alternative way to create the above dict:

myDict = {"john": "johns value", "jeff": "jeffs value"}

Accessing values:

print(myDict["jeff"]) # => "jeffs value"

Getting the keys (in Python v2):

print(myDict.keys()) # => ["john", "jeff"]

In Python 3, you'll get a dict_keys, which is a view and a bit more efficient (see views docs and PEP 3106 for details).

print(myDict.keys()) # => dict_keys(['john', 'jeff']) 

If you want to learn about python dictionary internals, I recommend this ~25 min video presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Kc8xzcA68. It's called the "The Mighty Dictionary".

idx = next((i for i, word in enumerate(s.split()) if search_string in word), None)

To handle StopIteration explicitly, instead of silently returning None, remove the second parameter from the statement and use a try/except block:

try:
    idx = next(i for i, word in enumerate(s.split()) if search_string in word)
except StopIteration:
    ... # do something