I am now studying Python, and I am trying to solve the following exercise:

Assuming there is a list of words in a text file, My goal is to print the longest N words in this list.

Where there are several important points:

1. The print order does not matter
2. Words that appear later in the file are given priority to be selected (when there are several words with the same length, i added an example for it)
3. assume that each row in the file contains only one single word
4. Is there a simple and easy solution for a short list of words, as opposed to a more complex solution for a situation where the list contains several thousand words?

I have attached an example of the starting code to a single word with a maximum length,

And an example of output for N = 4, for an explanation of my question.

Thanks for your advice,

word_list1 = open('WORDS.txt', 'r')def find_longest_word(word_list):longest_word = ''for word in word_list:if len(word) > len(longest_word):longest_word = wordprint(longest_word)find_longest_word(word_list1)example(N=4):
WORDS.TXT
---------
Mother
Dad
Cat
Bicycle
House
Hat

The result will be (as i said before, print order dosen't matter):

Hat
House
Bicycle
Mother

thanks in advance!

One alternative is to use a heap to maintain the top-n elements:

import heapq
from operator import itemgetterdef top(lst, n=4):heap = [(0, i, '') for i in range(n)]heapq.heapify(heap)for i, word in enumerate(lst):item = (len(word), i, word)if item > heap[0]:heapq.heapreplace(heap, item)return list(map(itemgetter(2), heap))words = ['Mother', 'Dad', 'Cat', 'Bicycle', 'House', 'Hat']print(top(words))

Output

['Hat', 'House', 'Bicycle', 'Mother']

In the heap we keep items that correspond to length and position, so in case of ties the last one to appear gets selected.