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

[Marc Tompkins]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 5:42 AM, Lie Ryan <lie.1296 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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:
>


>
> Other than overkill, it is wrong. If the shortest "word" is longer than
> maxint it'd give wrong result.

What language do you speak (or machine do you use), where the shortest word
in a potential list is longer than maxint?  On my machine maxint is
2,147,483,647.  That's what I meant by overkill.

You could just simply use the len of the first word.

True dat.  Requires an extra step or two, though - initializing with some
impossibly huge number is quick.


> The best solution though, have been answered by Kent Johnson.
>
Extremely terse and elegant, doesn't find ties.

def MinKent(corpora=""):
>     words= corpora.split()
>     return min(words, key=len)
>
> print MinKent("No victim has ever been more repressed and alienated than
> the truth is")
>

Output: No

Mine returns (2, ['No', 'is'], 9, ['repressed', 'alienated']).  I could be
wrong - it seemed more like what the OP actually wanted, but he'd be the
judge of that.

-- 
www.fsrtechnologies.com
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