Posts tagged learning

Finding the longest or shortest item in a list

Python is a powerful language to quickly and efficiently do work with data, but it requires a more in-depth knowledge of the language to write more elegant and readable code. For many new Python programmers, this is a catch-22 as they’re still learning all the details and it takes time. Let’s take a simple example about finding the longest string in a list and simplify some code. Secondly making the code faster as we will use built-in functions at machine speed instead of interpreting Python code.

The example is a for-loop over a list and checks if the new item is longer than the current longest item before it stores it as the longest. Afterward, it prints the result which will be longest in this case.

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