Python - arranging words in alphabetical order

Question

The program must print the name which is alphabetically the last one out of 8 elements. The names/words can be inputted in any way through code. I think I should be using lists and in range() here. I had an idea of comparing the first/second/third/... letter of the input name with the letters of the previous one and then putting it at the end of the list or in front of the previous one (depending on the comparison), and then repeating that for the next name. At the end the program would print the last member of the list.

Answer 1

Python's string comparisons are lexical by default, so you should be able to call max and get away with it:

In [15]: sentence
Out[15]: ['this', 'is', 'a', 'sentence']
In [16]: max(sentence)
Out[16]: 'this'

Of course, if you want to do this manually:

In [16]: sentence
Out[16]: ['this', 'is', 'a', 'sentence']

In [17]: answer = ''

In [18]: for word in sentence:
   ....:     if word > answer:
   ....:         answer = word
   ....:         

In [19]: print answer
this

Or you can sort your sentence:

In [20]: sentence
Out[20]: ['this', 'is', 'a', 'sentence']

In [21]: sorted(sentence)[-1]
Out[21]: 'this'

Or, sort it reversed:

In [25]: sentence
Out[25]: ['this', 'is', 'a', 'sentence']

In [26]: sorted(sentence, reverse=True)[0]
Out[26]: 'this'

But if you want to fully manual (which is so painful):

def compare(s1, s2):
    for i,j in zip(s1, s2):
        if ord(i)<ord(j):
            return -1
        elif ord(i)>ord(j):
            return 1
    if len(s1)<len(s2):
        return -1
    elif len(s1)>len(s2):
        return 1
    else return 0

answer = sentence[0]
for word in sentence[1:]:
    if compare(answer, word) == -1:
        answer = word

# answer now contains the biggest word in your sentence

If you want this to be agnostic of capitalization, be sure to call str.lower() on your words first:

sentence = [word.lower() for word in sentence] # do this before running any of the above algorithms