Custom Python list sorting

user_192337 0
Viewed 165949

I was refactoring some old code of mine and came across of this:

alist.sort(cmp_items)

def cmp_items(a, b):
    if a.foo > b.foo:
        return 1
    elif a.foo == b.foo:
        return 0
    else:
        return -1

The code works (and I wrote it some 3 years ago!) but I cannot find this thing documented anywhere in the Python docs and everybody uses sorted() to implement custom sorting. Can someone explain why this works?

list sorting python
6 Answers

This does not work in Python 3.

You can use functools cmp_to_key to have old-style comparison functions work though.

from functools import cmp_to_key

def cmp_items(a, b):
    if a.foo > b.foo:
        return 1
    elif a.foo == b.foo:
        return 0
    else:
        return -1

cmp_items_py3 = cmp_to_key(cmp_items)

alist.sort(cmp_items_py3)
user_9926870

I know many have already posted some good answers. However I want to suggest one nice and easy method without importing any library.

l = [(2, 3), (3, 4), (2, 4)]
l.sort(key = lambda x: (-x[0], -x[1]) )
print(l)
l.sort(key = lambda x: (x[0], -x[1]) )
print(l)

Output will be

[(3, 4), (2, 4), (2, 3)]
[(2, 4), (2, 3), (3, 4)]

The output will be sorted based on the order of the parameters we provided in the tuple format

user_94832640

Even better:

student_tuples = [
    ('john', 'A', 15),
    ('jane', 'B', 12),
    ('dave', 'B', 10),
]

sorted(student_tuples, key=lambda student: student[2])   # sort by age
[('dave', 'B', 10), ('jane', 'B', 12), ('john', 'A', 15)]

Taken from: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sorting.html

Steven_805660
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