Find the closest match of a list in a list containing lists

Question

I have a list with two elements like this:

list_a = [27.666521, 85.437447]

and another list like this:

big_list = [[27.666519,          


        

Answer 1

From your question, it's hard to tell how you want to measure the distance, so I simply assume you mean Euclidean distance.

You can use the key parameter to min():

from functools import partial

def distance_squared(x, y):
    return (x[0] - y[0])**2 + (x[1] - y[1])**2

print min(big_list, key=partial(distance_squared, list_a))