I am trying to make a function which return max from nested list?

Question

I wrote this and its working fine with everything but when I have an empty list in a given list(given_list=[[],1,2,3]) it saying index is out of range. Any help?

Answer 1

This will find the maximum in a list which contains nested lists and ignore string instances.

A = [2, 4, 6, 8, [[11, 585, "tu"], 100, [9, 7]], 5, 3, "ccc", 1]

def M(L):

    # If list is empty, return nothing
    if len(L) == 0:
        return

    # If the list size is one, it could be one element or a list
    if len(L) == 1:

        # If it's a list, get the maximum out of it
        if isinstance(L[0], list):
            return M(L[0])
        # If it's a string, ignore it
        if isinstance(L[0], str):
            return
        # Else return the value
        else:
            return L[0]

    # If the list has more elements, find the maximum
    else:
        return max(M(L[:1]), M(L[1:]))


print A
print M(A)

Padmal's BLOG