Rehceb Rotkiv wrote: >> If you want a good answer you have to give me/us more details, and an >> example too. > > OK, here is some example data: > > reaction is BUT by the > sodium , BUT it is > sea , BUT it is > this manner BUT the dissolved > pattern , BUT it is > rapid , BUT it is > > As each line consists of 5 words, I would break up the data into an array > of five-field-arrays (Would you use lists or tuples or a combination in > Python?). The word "BUT" would be in the middle, with two fields/words > left and two fields/words right of it. I then want to sort this list by > > - field 3 > - field 4 > - field 1 > - field 0
You're probably looking for the key= argument to list.sort(). If your function simply returns the fields in the order above, I believe you get the right thing:: >>> s = '''\ ... reaction is BUT by the ... sodium , BUT it is ... sea , BUT it is ... this manner BUT the dissolved ... pattern , BUT it is ... rapid , BUT it is ... ''' >>> word_lists = [line.split() for line in s.splitlines()] >>> def key(word_list): ... return word_list[3], word_list[4], word_list[1], word_list[0] ... >>> word_lists.sort(key=key) >>> word_lists [['reaction', 'is', 'BUT', 'by', 'the'], ['pattern', ',', 'BUT', 'it', 'is'], ['rapid', ',', 'BUT', 'it', 'is'], ['sea', ',', 'BUT', 'it', 'is'], ['sodium', ',', 'BUT', 'it', 'is'], ['this', 'manner', 'BUT', 'the', 'dissolved']] STeVe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
