Thanks. This is what I wanted.

soichi

2012/1/4 Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com>
> Is there any Emacs built-in function that returns the index of an element of
> a list?

If you don't mind using the CL package (included with Emacs), the
function you want is `position'

 (position "banana" '("apple" "banana" "orange") :test 'string=)   =>  1

    Juanma