I'm writing a program in Python to find the shortest and longest strings in an array, eg this is find_shortest
def find_shortest(words):
N = len(words)
shortest = words[0]
i = 1
while i < N:
if len(shortest) >= len(words[i]): #Change only this line for find_longest
shortest = words[i]
i += 1
return shortest
My problem is that the find_longest function is identical to the find_shortest function, except find_longest uses a <= sign instead of >=. I don't want to copy paste the find_shortest function to make find_longest but I see no alternative. How do I avoid copy pasting and redundancy in this scenario?
You could create a comparison function to use based on what "mode" the function is in
def find(words, mode):
compare = (lambda x, y: x >= y) if mode == 'shortest' else (lambda x, y: x <= y)
N = len(words)
result = words[0]
i = 1
while i < N:
if compare(len(result), len(words[i])):
result = words[i]
i += 1
return result
where mode is the value 'shortest' or 'longest'. Could be simplified to just a boolean if you want. I used a string just for clarity.