Question

I have a dictionary whose components are all 2-tuples (all integers) and I want to find the key to the tuple with the largest second component. How can I do this in Python 2.6?

Answer 1

The following will do it (where d is your dictionary):

max(d.items(), key=lambda(k,v):v[1])[0]

In this solution, the key (if you pardon the pun) is to use the optional key argument to max.