How to find the shortest string in a list in Python

Question

This seems like a pretty simple problem, but I\'m looking for a short and sweet way of doing it that is still understandable (this isn\'t code golf).

Given a list of

Answer 1

Potential answer:

l = [...some strings...]
l.sort(key=len)
shortest = l[0]

However, this is probably very inefficient in that it sorts the entire list, which is unnecessary. We really just need the minimum.