Find the nth occurrence of substring in a string

Here's another re + itertools version that should work when searching for either a str or a RegexpObject. I will freely admit that this is likely over-engineered, but for some reason it entertained me.

import itertools
import re

def find_nth(haystack, needle, n = 1):
    """
    Find the starting index of the nth occurrence of ``needle`` in \
    ``haystack``.

    If ``needle`` is a ``str``, this will perform an exact substring
    match; if it is a ``RegexpObject``, this will perform a regex
    search.

    If ``needle`` doesn't appear in ``haystack``, return ``-1``. If
    ``needle`` doesn't appear in ``haystack`` ``n`` times,
    return ``-1``.

    Arguments
    ---------
    * ``needle`` the substring (or a ``RegexpObject``) to find
    * ``haystack`` is a ``str``
    * an ``int`` indicating which occurrence to find; defaults to ``1``

    >>> find_nth("foo", "o", 1)
    1
    >>> find_nth("foo", "o", 2)
    2
    >>> find_nth("foo", "o", 3)
    -1
    >>> find_nth("foo", "b")
    -1
    >>> import re
    >>> either_o = re.compile("[oO]")
    >>> find_nth("foo", either_o, 1)
    1
    >>> find_nth("FOO", either_o, 1)
    1
    """
    if (hasattr(needle, 'finditer')):
        matches = needle.finditer(haystack)
    else:
        matches = re.finditer(re.escape(needle), haystack)
    start_here = itertools.dropwhile(lambda x: x[0] < n, enumerate(matches, 1))
    try:
        return next(start_here)[1].start()
    except StopIteration:
        return -1