How to sort a list of lists by a specific index of the inner list?

Question

I have a list of lists. For example,

[
[0,1,'f'],
[4,2,'t'],
[9,4,'afsd']
]

If I wanted to sort the outer list by the string field of the inner lists, how would you do that in python?

Answer 1

This is a job for itemgetter

>>> from operator import itemgetter
>>> L=[[0, 1, 'f'], [4, 2, 't'], [9, 4, 'afsd']]
>>> sorted(L, key=itemgetter(2))
[[9, 4, 'afsd'], [0, 1, 'f'], [4, 2, 't']]

It is also possible to use a lambda function here, however the lambda function is slower in this simple case

Answer 2

in place

>>> l = [[0, 1, 'f'], [4, 2, 't'], [9, 4, 'afsd']]
>>> l.sort(key=lambda x: x[2])

not in place using sorted:

>>> sorted(l, key=lambda x: x[2])

Answer 3

Itemgetter 允许您按多个条件/列进行排序：

sorted_list = sorted(list_to_sort, key=itemgetter(2,0,1))

Answer 4

也可以通过 lambda 函数实现多个条件

sorted_list = sorted(list_to_sort, key=lambda x: (x[1], x[0]))

Answer 5

array.sort(key = lambda x:x[1])

您可以使用此代码段轻松排序，其中 1 是元素的索引。

Answer 6

Like this:

import operator
l = [...]
sorted_list = sorted(l, key=operator.itemgetter(desired_item_index))

Answer 7

I think lambda function can solve your problem.

old_list = [[0,1,'f'], [4,2,'t'],[9,4,'afsd']]

#let's assume we want to sort lists by last value ( old_list[2] )
new_list = sorted(old_list, key=lambda x: x[2])

#Resulst of new_list will be:

[[9, 4, 'afsd'], [0, 1, 'f'], [4, 2, 't']]

Answer 8

More easy to understand (What is Lambda actually doing):

ls2=[[0,1,'f'],[4,2,'t'],[9,4,'afsd']]
def thirdItem(ls):
    #return the third item of the list
    return ls[2]
#Sort according to what the thirdItem function return 
ls2.sort(key=thirdItem)

Answer 9

**old_list = [[0,1,'f'], [4,2,'t'],[9,4,'afsd']]
    #let's assume we want to sort lists by last value ( old_list[2] )
    new_list = sorted(old_list, key=lambda x: x[2])**

correct me if i'm wrong but isnt the 'x[2]' calling the 3rd item in the list, not the 3rd item in the nested list? should it be x[2][2]?

Answer 10

Sorting a Multidimensional Array execute here

arr=[[2,1],[1,2],[3,5],[4,5],[3,1],[5,2],[3,8],[1,9],[1,3]]



arr.sort(key=lambda x:x[0])
la=set([i[0] for i in Points])

for i in la:
    tempres=list()
    for j in arr:
        if j[0]==i:
            tempres.append(j[1])

    for j in sorted(tempres,reverse=True):
        print(i,j)

Answer 11

Make sure that you do not have any null or NaN values in the list you want to sort. If there are NaN values, then your sort will be off, impacting the sorting of the non-null values.

Check out Python: sort function breaks in the presence of nan