Search code examples
pythonsortingalphabetical

Python: Alphabetically sorting a list with letters and numbers in

I have a list

['2,alex', '5,james', '3,ben']

I need to alphabetically sort this.

The output should be

['2,alex', '3,ben', '5,james']

However using the .sort function does not work and will only sort it in a numerical order.

Solution

  • You can give list.sort() a key like below. If you want sort by the number, you can just use str.split(',')[0] to get it, and convert it to an integer:

    >>> l = ['2,alex', '5,james', '3,ben']
>>> l.sort(key=lambda x: int(x.split(',')[0]))
>>> l
['2,alex', '3,ben', '5,james']

    If you need sort it by name, not the number, just use the same way but replace [0] with [1], and remove the int() function:

    >>> l = ['2,alex', '5,james', '3,ben']
>>> l.sort(key=lambda x: x.split(',')[1])
>>> l
['2,alex', '3,ben', '5,james']

    Let's see a clear example:

    >>> sorted(l, key=lambda x: int(x.split(',')[0]))
['5,james', '10,ben', '22,alex']
>>> sorted(l, key=lambda x: x.split(',')[1])
['22,alex', '10,ben', '5,james']