Python find min max and average of a list (array)

Question

I am having hard time to figure out how to find min from a list for example

somelist = [1,12,2,53,23,6,17]

how can I find min and max of this list with defining (def) a function

I do not want to use built-in function min

Answer 1

from __future__ import division

somelist =  [1,12,2,53,23,6,17] 
max_value = max(somelist)
min_value = min(somelist)
avg_value = sum(somelist)/len(somelist)

If you want to manually find the minimum as a function:

somelist =  [1,12,2,53,23,6,17] 

def my_min_function(somelist):
    min_value = None
    for value in somelist:
        if not min_value:
            min_value = value
        elif value < min_value:
            min_value = value
    return min_value

Python 3.4 introduced the statistics package, which provides mean and additional stats:

from statistics import mean, median

somelist =  [1,12,2,53,23,6,17]
avg_value = mean(somelist)
median_value = median(somelist)

Answer 2

Return min and max value in tuple:

def side_values(num_list):
    results_list = sorted(num_list)
    return results_list[0], results_list[-1]


somelist = side_values([1,12,2,53,23,6,17])
print(somelist)