I don't know exactly what you are doing, but float("inf")
gives you a float Infinity, which is greater than any other number.
Another, less convenient, way to do it is to use Decimal
class:
from decimal import Decimal
pos_inf = Decimal('Infinity')
neg_inf = Decimal('-Infinity')
Also if you use SymPy you can use sympy.oo
>>> from sympy import oo
>>> oo + 1
oo
>>> oo - oo
nan
etc.
In python2.x there was a dirty hack that served this purpose (NEVER use it unless absolutely necessary):
None < any integer < any string
Thus the check i < ''
holds True
for any integer i
.
It has been reasonably deprecated in python3. Now such comparisons end up with
TypeError: unorderable types: str() < int()
Since Python 3.5 you can use math.inf
:
>>> import math
>>> math.inf
inf
No one seems to have mentioned about the negative infinity explicitly, so I think I should add it.
For negative infinity:
-math.inf
For positive infinity (just for the sake of completeness):
math.inf
There is an infinity in the NumPy library: from numpy import inf
. To get negative infinity one can simply write -inf
.
Source: Stackoverflow.com