Question

I am using Queue.Priority class in python 2.7 as below

q=Queue.PriorityQueue()
q.put((2,"second"))
q.put((1,"first"))
q.put((3,"third"))
print q.get(True)
print q.get(True)
print q.get(True)

This would return the following result since get() returns the item of lowest priority

(1, 'first')
(2, 'second')
(3, 'third') 

Suppose,I need get to return the item of highest priority .what should I do? Is there a way to do this other than overriding get() method?

Answer 1

If it’s just the first element of the tuple that matters, and it’s an integer, you could simply negate it:

q=Queue.PriorityQueue()
q.put((-2,"second"))
q.put((-1,"first"))
q.put((-3,"third"))
print q.get(True)
print q.get(True)
print q.get(True)

This will print out:

(-3, 'third') 
(-2, 'second')
(-1, 'first')