I am trying to make a function which return max from nested list?

Question

I wrote this and its working fine with everything but when I have an empty list in a given list(given_list=[[],1,2,3]) it saying index is out of range. Any help?

Answer 1

If the nesting is arbitrarily deep, you first need recursion to untangle it:

def items(x):
    if isinstance(x, list):
        for it in x:
            for y in items(it): yield y
    else: yield x

Now, max(items(whatever)) will work fine.

In recent releases of Python 3 you can make this more elegant by changing

        for it in x:
            for y in items(x): yield y

into:

        for it in x: yield from it