Is there a simple way to find the list index to the max value?

Arnaud Delobelle arnodel at googlemail.com
Tue Feb 16 17:21:06 EST 2010


aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:

> In article <4B7A91B1.6030301 at lonetwin.net>, steve  <steve at lonetwin.net> wrote:
>>On 02/16/2010 05:49 PM, W. eWatson wrote:
>>>
>>> See Subject. a = [1,4,9,3]. Find max, 9, then index to it, 2.
>>
>>The most obvious would be a.index(max(a)). Is that what you wanted ?
>
> The disadvantage of that is that it's O(2N) instead of O(N).

:-)

Joke aside, even though you traverse the list twice, it may still be
quicker than other solutions because both max and list.index are C
functions and no intermediate object is constructed.

-- 
Arnaud



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