Daniel Schüle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > lst.sort(lambda x,y: cmp(x[1], y[1]))
Since no-one mentioned it and its a favourite of mine, you can use the decorate-sort-undecorate method, or "Schwartzian Transform" eg lst = [[1,4],[3,9],[2,5],[3,2]] # decorate - ie make a copy of each item with the key(s) first and the # actual object last L = [ (x[1],x) for x in lst ] # sort L.sort() # undecorate L = [ x[-1] for x in L ] The Schwartzian transform is especially good when making the key is expensive - it only needs to be done N times, wheras a typical sort routine will call the cmp function N log N times. Its expensive in terms of memory though. With python 2.4 you can wrap it up into one line if you want [ x[-1] for x in sorted([ (x[1],x) for x in lst ]) ] or even [ x[-1] for x in sorted((x[1],x) for x in lst) ] -- Nick Craig-Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
