Python - printing multiple shortest and longest words from a list

Question

I need to go through a list and print the longest words in it. I can do this for just one word, but can\'t figure out how to print more than one, if there are two words

Answer 1

You can use a dict to collect the words:

results = {}
for word in words:
   if len(word) not in results:
      results[len(word)] = []
   results[len(word)].append(word)

Next sort the dictionary by the keys, which are the lengths and print the words. This prints the longest words first, to reverse it, remove reverse=True:

for i in sorted(results.keys(), reverse=True):
   print 'Number of words with length {}: {}'.format(i,len(results[i]))
   for word in results[i]:
      print word

To print only the shortest and longest:

shortest = sorted(results.keys())[0]
longest = sorted(results.keys(), reverse=True)[0]

print 'Shortest words:'

for word in results[shortest]:
   print word

print 'Longest words:'

for word in results[longest]:
   print word