How to sort a list with sort function in python with less time complexity?

Question

I want to sort this list a = [31415926535897932384626433832795, 1, 3, 10, 3, 5]. To reduce time complexity I want to first check whether the 2 elements are of same length or not. If both are of not same length I will swap them according to their length otherwise I will check which number is bigger and swap them. I want to implement this using .sort() function which have a parameter called key . I can use a.sort(key=len) but it will only work for the test cases with different length inputs. Please help me regarding this.

Answer 1

When you are using sort() in Python, you can provide a function or anonymous ( lambda ) function to it as a basis for sorting.

In this case, you can use lambda x where x are the elements in a .

Subsequently, providing a tuple as a return result in the function allows the sort to prioritize in sorting, thus what you need is this:

a.sort(key=lambda x: (len(str(x)), x))

In the above code, a sorts first by len(str(x)) then by the value of x

Edit: Added explanation