Yes, it's quite simple with list comprehensions.

The technique, attributed to Randal Schwartz of the Perl community, sorts the elements of a list by a metric which maps each element to its "sort value". To sort a list of strings by their uppercase values:

tmp1 = [ (x.upper(), x) for x in L ] # Schwartzian transform
tmp1.sort()
Usorted = [ x[1] for x in tmp1 ]

To sort by the integer value of a subfield extending from positions 10-15 in each string:

tmp2 = [ (int(s[10:15]), s) for s in L ] # Schwartzian transform
tmp2.sort()
Isorted = [ x[1] for x in tmp2 ]

Note that Isorted may also be computed by

def intfield(s):
    return int(s[10:15])

def Icmp(s1, s2):
    return cmp(intfield(s1), intfield(s2))

Isorted = L[:]
Isorted.sort(Icmp)

but since this method calls intfield() many times for each element of L, it is slower than the Schwartzian Transform.

CATEGORY: programming

last updated 2 years ago by effbot #