Custom sort order in Python

Note that for the example you have given you are wasting time sorting list2 as you can simply use the already sorted list1 if the items in list2 are unique:

print([e for e in list1 if e in list2])

should print

['Stella', 'Joe']

To improve it even more, you can use a set for faster lookups:

set2 = set(list2)
print([e for e in list1 if e in set2])

This second variant works in O(n) which is faster than any sorting algorithm.

Edit: The answers given by Nick and Jab are close to O(n*m + n*log n). This is a O(n * log n) solution that works for non-unique cases:

lookup_dict = {k: i for i, k in enumerate(list1)}
print(sorted(list2, key=lookup_dict.get))

There's no need to use a lambda in the sorted function. Just supply it the index function of list1:

sorted(list2, key=list1.index)

If list1 and list2 are both guaranteed to contain only unique elements, you can turn list2 into a set and select from list1 based on it:

set2 = set(list2)
list2_sorted = [x for x in list1 if x in set2]

If, on the other hand list2 contains non-unique elements, you can use collections.Counter to do the same thing while maintaining optimal algorithmic complexity.

counter2 = Counter(list2)
list2_sorted = []
for x in list1:
    list2_sorted.extend([x] * counter2[x])

The algorithmic complexity is the same here because python's list growing is amortized to provide O(n) behavior in the long term, and the keys of a Counter, or any other dict, are implemented as a hash-table with O(1) lookup, just like a set.

You can use a nested comprehension instead of the loop:

list2_sorted = [x for x in list1 for _ in range(counter2[x])]

You can use the set-like behavior of dictionaries to maintain O(n) behavior even if list1 contains duplicates, as long as the sort order is determined only by the first occurrence. In Python 3.6+ dictionaries are ordered, so you could use plain dict. Prior versions would require you to use collections.OrderedDict to obtain the same behavior:

list1_keys = OrderedDict.fromkeys(list1)
list2_sorted = [x for x in list1_keys for _ in range(counter2[x])]

The reason to use a dict when you are looking for set-like behavior is that set is not ordered.

You can use a lambda function in sorted, taking list1.index() of the value to get a sort order:

list1 = ['Stella', 'Bob', 'Joe', 'Betty']

list2 = ['Joe', 'Stella']
sorted(list2, key=lambda v:list1.index(v))

Output:

['Stella', 'Joe']