Accessing the index in 'for' loops?

How do I access the index in a for loop like the following?

ints = [8, 23, 45, 12, 78]
for i in ints:
    print('item #{} = {}'.format(???, i))

I want this output

item #1 = 8
item #2 = 23
item #3 = 45
item #4 = 12
item #5 = 78

When I loop through it using a for loop, how do I access the loop index, from 1 to 5 in this case?

Using an additional state variable such as index variables which you would normally use in languages such as c or php is considered non-pythonic

The better option is to use the built-in function enumerate() , available in both Python 2 and 3.

for idx, val in enumerate(ints):
    print(idx, val)

Check out PEP 279 for more.