How do I sort a list of objects based on an attribute of the objects?

Question

I have a list of Python objects that I want to sort by a specific attribute of each object:

[Tag(name="toe", count=10), Tag(name="leg", count=2), ...]

How do I sort the list by .count in descending order?

Answer 1

To sort the list in place:

orig_list.sort(key=lambda x: x.count, reverse=True)

To return a new list, use sorted:

new_list = sorted(orig_list, key=lambda x: x.count, reverse=True)

Explanation:

• key=lambda x: x.count sorts by count.
• reverse=True sorts in descending order.

More on sorting by keys.