Print the largest odd number entered

Question

I wrote this code to solve a problem from a John Vuttag book:

Ask the user to input 10 integers, and then print the largest odd number that was entered. If no odd number was entered, it should print a message to that effect.

Can my code be optimized or made more concise? Any tips or errors found?

{
    a = int (raw_input("enter num: "))
    b = int (raw_input("enter num: "))
    c = int (raw_input("enter num: "))
    d = int (raw_input("enter num: "))
    e = int (raw_input("enter num: "))
    f = int (raw_input("enter num: "))
    g = int (raw_input("enter num: "))
    h = int (raw_input("enter num: "))
    i = int (raw_input("enter num: "))
    j = int (raw_input("enter num: "))


    num_List = {a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j }
    mylist=[]

    ## Use for loop to search for odd numbers

    for i in num_List:

                 if i&1 :
                     mylist.insert(0,i)
                     pass


                 elif i&1 is not True: 
                     continue
    if not mylist:
        print 'no odd integers were entered'
    else:
        print max (mylist)

}

Answer 1

Your main loop can just be:

for i in num_list:
    if i & 1:
        mylist.append(i)

There is no need for the else at all since you don't do anything if i is not odd.

Also, there is no need at all for two lists. Just one is enough:

NUM_ENTRIES = 10

for dummy in range(NUM_ENTRIES):
    i = int(raw_input("enter num: "))
    if i & 1:
        mylist.append(i)

Then the rest of the program is as you wrote it.

Answer 2

This is a solution that doesn't use lists, and only goes through the input once.

maxOdd = None

for _ in range(10):
    num = int (raw_input("enter num: "))
    if num & 1:
        if maxOdd is None or maxOdd < num:
            maxOdd = num

if maxOdd:
    print "The max odd number is", maxOdd        
else:
    print "There were no odd numbers entered"

Answer 3

One other minor change you could make, would be to just loop over a range how many times you want to prompt the user for data:

mylist = list()
for _ in range(10):
    while True:
        try:
            i = int(raw_input("enter num: "))
            if i & 1:
                mylist.append(i)
            break
        except ValueError:
            print "Enter only numbers!"

No need to create an extra variable and increment it here.

Answer 4

My 2c: though I don't know Python syntax that well, here's an optimization idea that would be more important given a (much) bigger dataset.

You don't need any lists at all. On the outside of the loop, declare a "maximum odd" variable, initially equal to -1. On the inside of the loop, whenever a number is input, if it's odd and greater than maximumOdd, then set maximumOdd equal to that number. This requires nearly no memory, whereas building up a list and then operating on it scales linearly in memory (not good).

Answer 5

I'd write:

numbers = [int(raw_input("enter num: ")) for _ in range(10)]
odd_numbers = [n for n in numbers if n % 2 == 1]
message = (str(max(odd_numbers)) if odd_numbers else "no odd integers were entered")
print(message)