Question

I used a map to scan an input file and produce a word count.
the map keys are words and the values are occurrences of the word.
I converted the map to a list and sorted ascending by value.
Thus, I have a list of 2 tuples, with the least frequently occurring word in the first position of the list, and the most frequently occurring word in the last position of the list.

I know I can easily get the 2tuple in the last position of the list with myList.last and then accessing the second element of the result with the myTuple._2

Can it be done in a single line of code?
I want to make it as concise as I can.

Answer 1

Do you mean:

val muList = List(("aardvark", 1), ("cow", 5), ("dog", 9))
muList.last._2  // 9

This will get the last element of muList and then the second item in the tuple found there.

But you don’t need to convert to a List and sort and all that. You can just get the max-count element from the Map, and it will be much faster:

val mu = Map("aardvark" -> 1, "dog" -> 9, "cow" -> 5)
val highestCountPair = mu.maxBy(_._2)   // ("dog",9)
highestCountPair._2                     // 9

Or, if you don’t care about the word at all:

mu.map(_._2).max  // 9