Phil,

That's perfect.  (For my application, I've never seen a tie.  While 
possible, the likelihood is almost none.)

Thanks!

--
Noah

On 9/3/09 4:29 PM, Phil Spector wrote:
> Noah -
>    max(x[-which.max(x)]  will give you the second largest value,
> but it doesn't handle ties.
>    x[order(x,decreasing=TRUE)[n]]  will give you the nth largest
> value, with the same caveat regarding ties.  For example,
> x[order(x,decreasing=TRUE)[1:3]] will give you the three largest
> values.
>
>                     - Phil Spector
>                      Statistical Computing Facility
>                      Department of Statistics
>                      UC Berkeley
>                      spector@stat.berkeley.edu
>
>
> On Thu, 3 Sep 2009, Noah Silverman wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I use the max function often to find the top value from a matrix or 
>> column of a data.frame.
>>
>> Now I'm looking to find the top 2 (or three) values from my data.
>>
>> I know that I could sort the list and then access the first two 
>> items, but that seems like the "long way".  Is there some way to 
>> access "max_2" or similar?
>>
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> -- 
>> Noah
>>
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>>

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