Crazy python behaviour

Question

I have a little piece of python code in the server script for my website which looks a little bit like this:

console.append([str(x) for x in data])
console.append(str(max(data)))

quite simple, you might think, however the result it's outputting is this:

['3', '12', '3']
3

for some reason python thinks 3 is the max of [3,12,3]!

So am I doing something wrong? Or this is misbehaviour on the part of python?

Answer 1

I know very little Python, but you are taking the max of strings, which means that '3..' is greater than '1..'.

Answer 2

Because the character '3' is higher in the ASCII table than '1'. You are comparing strings, not numbers. If you want to compare the numerically, you need to convert them to numbers. One way is max(data, key=int), but you might want to actually store numbers in the list.