[Tutor] sumHighest function help

[Peter Otten]

Lloyd Francis wrote:

> I want to write a function that will calculate and return the sum of the
> *n* highest value in a list *a. *Also, when n is less than 0, the answer
> should be zero, and if n is greater than the number of elements in the
> list, all elements should be included in the sum.
> 
> In addition i want to write the code in a function with only one line of
> code in it.
> So far I have:-
> 
> def sumHighest(a, n):
> lambda a, n : sum(a[:n])
> 
> This doesn't work but i want to use *lambda *and the slice in the
> function.
> 
> An appropriate test would be:-
> 
> input - sumHighest([1,2,3,4], 2)
> output - 7
> 
> thanks L.

sum_highest = lambda items, n: sum(sorted(items, reverse=True)[:max(n, 0)])

or better:

import heapq

def sum_highest(items, n): 
    return sum(heapq.nlargest(n, items))