I have been reading the Core Python programming book, and the author shows an example like:
(4, 5) < (3, 5) # Equals false
So, I'm wondering, how/why does it equal false? How does python compare these two tuples?
Btw, it's not explained in the book.
This question is related to
python
comparison
tuples
a = ('A','B','C') # see it as the string "ABC"
b = ('A','B','D')
A is converted to its corresponding ASCII ord('A') #65 same for other elements
So,
>> a>b # True
you can think of it as comparing between string (It is exactly, actually)
the same thing goes for integers too.
x = (1,2,2) # see it the string "123"
y = (1,2,3)
x > y # False
because (1 is not greater than 1, move to the next, 2 is not greater than 2, move to the next 2 is less than three -lexicographically -)
The key point is mentioned in the answer above
think of it as an element is before another alphabetically not element is greater than an element and in this case consider all the tuple elements as one string.
The Python documentation does explain it.
Tuples and lists are compared lexicographically using comparison of corresponding elements. This means that to compare equal, each element must compare equal and the two sequences must be of the same type and have the same length.
The python 2.5 documentation explains it well.
Tuples and lists are compared lexicographically using comparison of corresponding elements. This means that to compare equal, each element must compare equal and the two sequences must be of the same type and have the same length.
If not equal, the sequences are ordered the same as their first differing elements. For example, cmp([1,2,x], [1,2,y]) returns the same as cmp(x,y). If the corresponding element does not exist, the shorter sequence is ordered first (for example, [1,2] < [1,2,3]).
Unfortunately that page seems to have disappeared in the documentation for more recent versions.
Source: Stackoverflow.com