Abc and 123

Language Help Python
1

hi there,

so i was going trough the basic algorithms part of computer science, and i was asked to make a function that finds the max value within a linked list, so i made the function without really seeing the test code that was already provided in the exercise. :
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then when i hit run and saw the test code output, i saw that one of the test linked lists was made with letters instead of numbers and it works the same
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and my question is, do letters work with operands the same way numbers do? like a < z = True
i probably missed one of the bases or i cant remember but this bugged me

2

From: 6. Expressions — Python 3.11.4 documentation

  • Strings (instances of str) compare lexicographically using the numerical Unicode code points (the result of the built-in function ord()) of their characters. [3]
print("A" < "D") # True
print("A" < "a") # True
print("D" < "a") # True
print(ord("D"))  # 68
print(ord("A"))  # 65
print(ord("a"))  # 97

There is a Codecademy exercise
https://www.codecademy.com/courses/learn-python-3/lessons/use-python-list/exercises/sort
showing how the sort() method can be used to sort a list of strings.

However, it doesn’t do natural sorting. See this post for a little more detail: FAQ: Working with Lists in Python - Sorting Lists I - #38 by mtrtmk

print(42 <  221) # True
print('42' < '221') # False
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