Search a sequence for its minimum and stop as soon as the lowest possible value is found

Sun Jan 8 06:24:04 EST 2017

Paul Rubin wrote:
> Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> writes:
>> seems to work, but is ugly. Maybe there's something better.
>> def minabs2(xs):
> def z():
> for x in xs:
> yield abs(x), x
> if x==0: break
> return min(z())[1]
>> is the same thing but a little bit nicer.

Yes, that's another variant of the decorate/undecorate approach combined 
with Wolfgang's local take_until(). The generalized form that cannot rely on 
the sequence items being orderable would be
firstitem = operator.itemgetter(0)
def stopmin_paul(items, *, key, stop):
 def take_until():
 for item in items:
 k = key(item)
 yield k, item
 if k <= stop:
 break
 return min(take_until(), key=firstitem)[1]