Hi, friends. I wanna ask if there is a function which is able to take a list as argument and then return its top-k maximums?

[Rhodri James]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:23:29 +0100, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net>  
wrote:

> On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:07:18 +1000
> Xavier Ho <contact at xavierho.com> wrote:
>> > print (sorted (l, reverse=True)[:k])
>>
>> You don't really need to reverse sort there:
>
> True but...
>
>> >>> numbers = [1, 4, 5, 3, 7, 8]
>> >>> sorted(numbers)[3:]
>> [5, 7, 8]
>
> Now try returning the top two or four numbers.

>>> sorted(numbers)[-2:]
[7, 8]
>>> sorted(numbers)[-4:]
[4, 5, 7, 8]

or in general

>>> sorted(numbers)[-k:]

That said, reverse sorting is probably clearer, and might be marginally  
faster, though frankly I can't be bothered to check that.

-- 
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeeste Herder to the Masses