Getting elements by index [Python]

Question

I had this excercise to find the counts of a specific set of persons in a number of given articles without using a dictionary.

I am facing an issue when I am trying to get elements from a list using their index. Specifically imagine that I have 3 lists:

[u'Putin', u'Fattah', u'Vladimir',u'Cameron', u'Bashar', u'al-Baghdadi'] counts : [3, 6, 1, 1, 1, 0] results: [6, 6, 1, 1, 1, 0] Sorted results: [6, 6, 1, 1, 1, 0]

First list contains the names of persons, the second their counts, the third one is derived after applying a formula and the fourth one is the third one sorted.

Given that I need to compare the 2 or three higher values and returned the most mentioned person when I do this:

elif res[0] == res[1]: idx = results[i].index(sorted_res[0]) idx2 = results[i].index(sorted_res[1]) print idx, results[idx] print idx2, results[idx2]

I get back:

1 Putin 1 Putin

where instead I want to get back:

1 Putin 2 Fattah

Any idea on whether that is possible without using dictionaries?

Thank you in advance.

third one is derived after applying a formula - It is not clear what that formula is — OneCricketeer
– OneCricketeer, Commented Feb 10, 2016 at 0:17
@PadraicCunningham It's a prerequisite. I am using NLTK's posTagger and collections library to get the counts of all words and then I extract the ones I care about — Swan87
– Swan87, Commented Feb 10, 2016 at 1:02

OneCricketeer · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-10 00:21:08Z

I would zip them all together so that you have a list like [('Putin', 3, 6), ('Fattah', 6,6), ...]. Then you can sort by the second element of the tuple (the result).

names = [u'Putin', u'Fattah', u'Vladimir',u'Cameron', u'Bashar', u'al-Baghdadi'] counts = [3, 6, 1, 1, 1, 0] results = [6, 6, 1, 1, 1, 0] all_vals = zip(names, counts, results) in_order = sorted(all_vals, key = lambda x: x[2], reverse = True) print in_order print in_order[0][0] #Putin print in_order[1][0] #Fattah for i,e in enumerate(in_order): print i, e[0] # 0 Putin # 1 Fattah # 2 Vladimir # ...

Not at all. It's good way to show how the answer generalizes beyond just the top 2.

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