Python: min(None, x)

Question

I would like to perform the following:

a=max(a,3) b=min(b,3) 

However sometimes a and b may be None.
I was happy to discover that in the case of max it works out nicely, giving my required result 3, however if b is None, b remains None...

Anyone can think of an elegant little trick to make min return the number in case one of the arguments in None?

Answer 1

Why don't you just create a generator without None values? It's simplier and cleaner.

>>> l=[None ,3] >>> min(i for i in l if i is not None) 3 

Answer 2

My solution for Python 3 (3.4 and greater):

min((x for x in lst if x is not None), default=None) max((x for x in lst if x is not None), default=None)