[Tutor] Finding the shortest word in a list of words

[Marc Tompkins]

2009/1/19 John Fouhy <john at fouhy.net>

> 2009/1/20 Emad Nawfal (عماد نوفل) <emadnawfal at gmail.com>:
> Of course, this is not necessarily the best answer for your particular
> problem.  The problem with sorting is that you have to look at some
> elements more than once.  For short lists, it's not a problem, but it
> can slow you down on bigger lists.  You could also find the shortest
> element by going through the list, remembering the shortest element
> you've seen so far.  This will be quicker if you only want to find the
> single shortest.
>

Here's the first thing that came to mind:

> from sys import maxint
>
> def MinMax(Sentence=""):
>     minLen = maxint
>     maxLen = 0
>
>     for word in Sentence.split():
>         if len(word) > maxLen:
>             maxWord = word
>             maxLen = len(word)
>         if len(word) < minLen:
>             minWord = word
>             minLen = len(word)
>     return minLen, minWord, maxLen, maxWord
>
>
> print MinMax("No victim has ever been more repressed and alienated than the
> truth")
>

Using sys.maxint to prime minLen is overkill, of course -
"antidisestablishmentarianism" is only 28 letters long, after all - but it
should be larger than any word you can expect to see.
This doesn't catch ties, though... could do that like so:

    for word in Sentence.split():
>         if len(word) == minLen:
>             minWord.append(word)
>         if len(word) == maxLen:
>             maxWord.append(word)
>         if len(word) > maxLen:
>             maxWord = [word]
>             maxLen = len(word)
>         if len(word) < minLen:
>             minWord = [word]
>             minLen = len(word)
>
>
-- 
www.fsrtechnologies.com
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