On Dec 12, 10:17 am, Robocop <btha...@physics.ucsd.edu> wrote: > I'm currently trying something along the lines of a sort.compare, but > as i'm never sure how many mini-lists i'll end up with, i'm not sure > how exactly to begin. Maybe something like a C vector, i.e. a list of > pointers to other lists? Or more specifically, compare dates in my > list, push that into some empty dates[], then do something along the > lines of for looping over dates to create subset lists, and nesting > some more compares within these lists to further sort the data by id. > Sound crazy or plausible?
Crazy, yes. Plausible that you might attempt it, yes. Learn about dictionaries. They're built in; you don't need to import them. E.g. [OTTOMH; untested] id_map = {} # maps (unique) id to the object with that id date_map = {} # maps date to a list of ids whose objects have that date for o in olist: if o.id in id_map: raise Exception("duplicate id: %r" % o.id) id_map[o.id] = o if o.date not in date_map: date_map[o.date] = [] date_map[o.date].append(o.id) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list