Putting elements from file in descending order without built in functions

Question

I re-did the program following the bubble sort.

def main():
try:
    array=[]
    file=open(input(\"Please enter the name of the file you wish to open:\" ))
             


        

Answer 1

Where you have this line:

x = minimum

I think you meant:

minimum = x

Seems like you just got the assignment order incorrect. Assigning to the variable x during your iteration of A wont have any side effects.

EDIT

Your problem as I discovered in the comments is that you are using the readlines() function, but only have a single line in your file. What you really want to do is read that line then use split() to generate a list:

A = file.read().split()

Keep in mind though that since you are using strings when comparing with '<', you will not get numerical order after your code running you will get lexicographic order.

example:

inputs:

5 4 14 6 -1 2 0 9 8 7 3 4 -10 200

output:

['-1']
['-1', '-10']
['-1', '-10', '0']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14', '2']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14', '2', '200']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14', '2', '200', '3']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14', '2', '200', '3', '4']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14', '2', '200', '3', '4', '4']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14', '2', '200', '3', '4', '4', '5']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14', '2', '200', '3', '4', '4', '5', '6']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14', '2', '200', '3', '4', '4', '5', '6', '7']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14', '2', '200', '3', '4', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8']
['-1', '-10', '0', '14', '2', '200', '3', '4', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9']

Notice above how 200 is not at the end but comes after 2, to get numerical order you need to coerce the strings into a numeric data type, probably an int. You can easily do this when you read the numbers from the file using the map function:

A = map(int, file.read().split())

This will call the int cast function on every element returned by split before storing the element in A. After this change this is the output that I see from your program:

inputs:

5 4 14 6 -1 2 0 9 8 7 3 4 -10 200

output:

[-10]
[-10, -1]
[-10, -1, 0]
[-10, -1, 0, 2]
[-10, -1, 0, 2, 3]
[-10, -1, 0, 2, 3, 4]
[-10, -1, 0, 2, 3, 4, 4]
[-10, -1, 0, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5]
[-10, -1, 0, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6]
[-10, -1, 0, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7]
[-10, -1, 0, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
[-10, -1, 0, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
[-10, -1, 0, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14]
[-10, -1, 0, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 200]