Question

I have a dictionary where keys are strings, and values are integers.

stats = {'a': 1, 'b': 3000, 'c': 0} 

How do I get the key with the maximum value? In this case, it is 'b'.

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Is there a nicer approach than using an intermediate list with reversed key-value tuples?

inverse = [(value, key) for key, value in stats.items()] print(max(inverse)[1]) 

Answer 1

You can use operator.itemgetter for that:

import operator stats = {'a': 1000, 'b': 3000, 'c': 100} max(stats.iteritems(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))[0] 

And instead of building a new list in memory use stats.iteritems(). The key parameter to the max() function is a function that computes a key that is used to determine how to rank items.

Please note that if you were to have another key-value pair ‘d’: 3000 that this method will only return one of the two even though they both have the maximum value.

>>> import operator >>> stats = {'a': 1000, 'b': 3000, 'c': 100, 'd': 3000} >>> max(stats.iteritems(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))[0] 'b'  

If using Python3:

>>> max(stats.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))[0] 'b'