Find the smallest element in a list

Question

I would like to find the smallest value of list a. I know that there is a function like min() to find the value but I would like do it work with a for-loop. I get the error Index out of range with the if-Statement, but I don't know why.

a = [18,15,22,25,11,29,31]
n = len(a)

tmp = a[0]
for i in a:
   if(a[i] < tmp):
      tmp = a[i]
      print(tmp)

Answer 1

When you iterate over a list in Python (for e in l:), you do not iterate over the indices but over the elements directly. So you should write:

for e in a:
    if(e < tmp):
        tmp = e
        print(tmp)