Search a sequence for its minimum and stop as soon as the lowest possible value is found

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Paul Rubin writes:

> Jussi Piitulainen writes:
>>> Use itertools.takewhile
>> How? It consumes the crucial stop element:
>
> Oh yucch, you're right, it takes it from both sides.  How about this:
>
>     from itertools import takewhile, islice
>     def minabs(xs):
> 	a = iter(xs)
> 	m = min(map(abs,takewhile(lambda x: x!=0, a)))
> 	z = list(islice(a,1))
> 	if z: return 0
> 	return m

That would return 0 even when there is no 0 in xs at all.

(It would also return the absolute value, not a value whose absolute
value is minimal, but that is easy to fix.)