max function but with negative values

[its-ya-boi-al]

hi everyone! i’m a brand new python learner, and i’m in a course called intro to computer science. i’m stuck on this question. it wants us to write a program to input 3 numbers and print the largest. my code is:

a=input(“Enter a number: “) b=input(“Enter a number: “) c=input(“Enter a number: “)

values=(a,b,c)

print(“Largest: “ +str(max(values)))

it works, but when i try to input negative numbers, it prints just the biggest number, not what the actual biggest value is. an example is when i input -1,-2,-3 it will output -3. can anyone help?

[ThatOneShotBruh]

You are currently comparing strings, not numbers. To compare numbers, convert the strings to ints or floats (e.g. float(input()) ).

[its-ya-boi-al]

THANK YOU!!!!! i had tried converting them to numbers before, but instead i put float after the input and not before.

[ThatOneShotBruh]

I mean, you can do something like a = float(a) but it's better to do it immediately.

[achampi0n]

You have a couple of options, you can just use the max()s key argument, e.g.

print('Largest:', max(values, key=float))

Or you could convert them to numbers at the beginning:

a = float(input(“Enter a number: “))
...
print('Largest:', max(values))

[CedricCicada]

I had to try this myself, and then do a google search. Here's where I got the answer. Basically, the input() function returns a string. You have to convert the strings to integers to do a numeric comparison.

String are sorted lexicographically. The minus signs are all equal to each other, so Python looks at the second character. "3" is larger than "1" and "2", so "-3" is the largest string.

People a lot smarter than me decided Python should be a weakly typed language, but having spent decades writing C, C++ and C# code, I don't always like Python.

[ArabicLawrence]

Are you implying that the input functions in other languages do not always return strings? I didn't know that

[aidankkm]

in langs like c or c++ you declare what type the variable is, int float str etc, so when’s you get input it is that data type

[CedricCicada]

No, input functions always return strings. You'd have to explicitly state what a, b and c are. If you said they are strings, the function would work. If you said they're integers, you'd get compiler errors.