Recursively find the kth largest int in list of list of int in Python

Question

As a newbie in programming, I am trying to do a function to find the kth largest int in a list of list of ints. I tried list of ints before and it worked.

However, for

Answer 1

some hints:

write a flatten function to convert list hierarchy to a single collection (with unique elements), sort and pick the k'th element.

sample implementation

def flatten(t):
     for e in t:
         if isinstance(e,list):
             yield from flatten(e)
         else:
             yield e



set(flatten([[1,[]], 9, [[1], [3]], [4]]))

{1, 3, 4, 9}

of course, this approach is not the most efficient (perhaps it's the least efficient). You can return the first k elements from each sub level and prune at k'th level at each merge.