Updating fields using python in ArcGIS 10

ChristinaHerrick1

I have 10 fields that have a floating value between 0 and 1.  These fields have a meaningless name, so they've been assigned aliases.  I also have three fields called 'First', 'Second', and 'Third' that are empty.  Using python, I want to find the first, second, and third highest of the 10 values for each record and assign the field alias to the First, Second, and Third fields respectively.

For instance, in a given record, if the highest value of the 10 floating numbers was from the field with the alias 'NF', then the field 'First' would get the value 'NF'.  I've been at this for a few hours and I can't seem to make it work.  Any help would be much appreciated.

ChristinaHerrick1

Thanks, Ben.  That's what I ended up doing.  Here's the code in case anyone's interested.  I'm sure someone else out there could do it in less lines of code, but it works nonetheless.

import os
from operator import itemgetter
import arcpy

inspace = "C:/Data/export.gdb"
shapefile = inspace + os.sep + "classification_2011_1028"

fields = arcpy.ListFields(shapefile, "M*") # The "nonsense" name of the 10 fields all began with 'M'
newfields = ["First", "Second", "Third"] # The empty fields where the top three numbers would go

uCursor = arcpy.UpdateCursor(shapefile)

for row in uCursor:
    fuzzy = []
    topthree = []
    x = 1
    for field in fields:
        name = field.aliasName 
        value = row.getValue(field.name)
        fuzzy.append([name,value])
    fuzzy.sort(key=itemgetter(1),reverse=True)
    for f in fuzzy:
        if x < 4:
            topthree.append(f[0])
            x+=1
    for rank, value in zip(newfields,topthree):
        row.setValue(rank,value)
    uCursor.updateRow(row)