[python] Custom Python list sorting

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?

Just like this example. You want sort this list.

[('c', 2), ('b', 2), ('a', 3)]

output:

[('a', 3), ('b', 2), ('c', 2)]

you should sort the tuples by the second item, then the first:

def letter_cmp(a, b):
    if a[1] > b[1]:
        return -1
    elif a[1] == b[1]:
        if a[0] > b[0]:
            return 1
        else:
            return -1
    else:
        return 1

Then convert it to a key function:

from functools import cmp_to_key
letter_cmp_key = cmp_to_key(letter_cmp))

Now you can use your custom sort order:

[('c', 2), ('b', 2), ('a', 3)].sort(key=letter_cmp_key)

As a side note, here is a better alternative to implement the same sorting:

alist.sort(key=lambda x: x.foo)

Or alternatively:

import operator
alist.sort(key=operator.attrgetter('foo'))

Check out the Sorting How To, it is very useful.

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)

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

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