The maximum value in a list is the element with the highest value. You can find the maximum value index in a list by passing the list to the built-in max() function and then using list.index(element) where the element is the max value. The list.index() method will return the index of the first occurrence of the maximum value.
Table of contents
Example: List of Numbers
Let’s look at an example of finding the index of the max value in a list of numbers.
# Define list
my_list = [2, 5, 10, 99, 4]
# Get max value of the list
max_val = max(my_list)
# Get index of max value
max_idx = my_list.index(max_val)
# Print result
print(f'Max value in {my_list} is {max_val}, with the index {max_idx}')
Let’s run the code to get the result:
Max value in [2, 5, 10, 99, 4] is 99, with the index 3
Note that the index of a list starts from 0.
Example: List of Characters
We can also use the max value for characters, for example,
# Define string
my_str = 'fortyfive'
# Convert string to list of characters
my_list = list(my_str)
# Get maximum ASCII value
max_val = max(my_list)
# Get the index for the maximum value
max_idx = my_list.index(max_val)
# Print the result
print(f'Max value in {my_list} is {max_val}, with the index {max_idx}')
In the case of characters, the max() function will find the character with the maximum ASCII value. Let’s run the code to get the result:
Max value in ['f', 'o', 'r', 't', 'y', 'f', 'i', 'v', 'e'] is y, with the index 4
Summary
Congratulations on reading to the end of this tutorial!
For further reading on getting the index of a value from a list, go to the article:
How to Find the Index of the Min Value in a List in Python
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