Question

I am trying to parse some data contained within a file:

>in:12 out:8 John

>in:20 out:12 Fred

>in:8 out:2 Danny

I would like to find the maximum in value, and find who has the maximum in (Fred does in my example).

Answer 1

It’s a non-standard data format you’ve got there. Hence, you’ve to write a non-standard parser (a better idea would be to use a standard exchange format like JSON and use a parser from the standard library). I’d

• create a Person class with, say, an in and out attribute
• write a parser function that takes a line from the input file and, if the line contains valid data, creates a new Person
• create a list of Persons from your input file called persons.
• sort this list ascending by in: persons_sorted = sorted(persons, key=lambda p: p.in)
• get the maximum: max_in_person = persons_sorted[-1]