Quickest way to find the nth largest value in a numpy Matrix

Question

There are lots of solutions to do this for a single array, but what about a matrix, such as:

>>> k
array([[ 35,  48,  63],
       [ 60,  77,  96],
          


        

Answer 1

You can flatten the matrix and then sort it:

>>> k = np.array([[ 35,  48,  63],
...        [ 60,  77,  96],
...        [ 91, 112, 135]])
>>> flat=k.flatten()
>>> flat.sort()
>>> flat
array([ 35,  48,  60,  63,  77,  91,  96, 112, 135])
>>> flat[-2]
112
>>> flat[-3]
96