python - When there are two identical smallest values in a list, how do you get the first value instead of the second?

Question

I have to get the smallest value from a list of monthly precipitation stats, then find the index of that element, then get the element with the same index value from a dictionary. This is the part of the code that is supposed to do this:

# finds the minimum precipitation from user's inputs and finds the corresponding month
min_precipitation = min(precipitation_by_month)
lowest_precipitation = precipitation_by_month.index(min_precipitation)
lowest_precipitation_month = months.pop(lowest_precipitation)
print (lowest_precipitation_month, 'has the lowest precipitation:', "{:.2f}".format(min_precipitation), 'inches.')

The problem is that in one of the inputs for this HW there are two 0.00 values in the list, but the program gets the second 0.00 value instead of the first (which is required) and therefore the wrong index number too.

Am I doing something wrong? How can I fix this?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66054874/when-there-are-two-identical-smallest-values-in-a-list-how-do-you-get-the-first

Answer 1

Just use the list.index method with the min(list) method and you will get index of the first smallest number in the list:

n = [0,1,2,3,0]

print(n.index(min(n)))

Output:

Index is: 0