Find the highest, second highest, third highest,

You can sort the list descending

list.sort(reverse=True)

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Check this small tutorial for start

Hi John,
Is there a way to do it without using sort?

What do you mean ? can you give a small example

You could sort the list and then extract the top n values like this.

n=3

mylist = [12,2,3,2,324,3]

mylist.sort(reverse=True)

print(mylist[:n]

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For example:

[10, 3, 4 , 1, 8]

Would be

[10, 3, 4, 1, 8]
[10, 8, 3, 4, 1]
[10, 8, 4, 3, 1]

It looks like you are sorting, not getting the largest, second largest, etc items from the list.

I think he wants to do it one step a time...
Probably the idea is to sort it first...pick first 3 as maximum1,maximum2,maximum3 (max1>max2>max3)
and then replace the list elements according to the above.

Yes, that is the idea @John.

so first part is done

This non-sorting code will get you the top three largest values in a list (a)

large = [max(a)]
large.append(max(a, key = lambda x: x not in large))
large.append(max(a, key = lambda x: x not in large))
print(large)

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But he wrote:

without using sort

We could employ set()

b = list(set(a))
b[::-1]

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We could move the .append() statement in my earlier comment into a loop that would stop when we didn't have any new values coming from the max() function.

This seems a bit like an insertion sort.