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✓ ANSWER ACCEPTED

What is the most efficient way to find the smallest value in a table?

Asked 198 views2 answers

Example Table

{{"Random String", 8},{"Random String2", 14},{"Random String3", 3}}

What is the best way to sort the table so it returns {"Random String3", 3} because it's second value is the smallest?

Currently I am using this script, but it seems very inefficient

		local smallestF = math.huge
		for mynodeSpot,mynode in pairs(specificOpenList) do
			if mynode[9] < smallestF then
				smallestF = mynode[9]
				currentNode = mynode
				currentNodeSpot = mynodeSpot
			end
		end

I did some research and found this

> mytable = {2,4,6,24,7,5}
> print(math.min(unpack(mytable)))
2

However, when using the type of table that I am using, it doesn't work. For some reason it returns the 8, which isn't the smallest value, and even if it did I would want the whole table so I can access the string attached to it.

> mytable = {{"Random String", 8},{"Random String2", 14},{"Random String3", 3}}
> print(math.min(unpack(mytable)[2]))
8

What is the best way to do this?

Anonymous

2 comments

1

Why don't you use a dictionary instead of what you're doing currently?

Anonymous#
0

How would I do it? Maybe I could, but I use the table for other things so reorganizing it would cause a lot more problems than it would solve.

Anonymous#

2 answers

✓ Accepted answer

You can use table.sort for this.

The second parameter allows you to further define the sort function.

local mytable = {{"Random String", 8}, {"Random String2", 14}, {"Random String3",3}};
table.sort(mytable, function(a, b) return a[2] < b[2]; end);

-- table now sorted from least to greatest by sub tables second value.
print(mytable[1][1], mytable[1][2]);
print(mytable[2][1], mytable[2][2]);
print(mytable[3][1], mytable[3][2]);

--[[
Output:
Random String3  3
Random String   8
Random String2  14
--]]
AnonymousPermalink

2 comments

0

Sorting the table is much more inefficient than finding the minimum.

Anonymous#
0

This may be true adark, but for what I am doing sorting the table once is much more efficient than finding the minimum hundreds of times.

Anonymous#

Your code is actually the best way to find the minimum Value in the table. However, you can make it slightly more efficient by moving currentNode = mynode to outside the loop:

local smallestF = math.huge
for mynodeSpot,mynode in pairs(specificOpenList) do
    if mynode[9] < smallestF then
        smallestF = mynode[9]
        currentNodeSpot = mynodeSpot
    end
end
currentNode = specificOpenList[currentNodeSpot]
AnonymousPermalink

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