#Python sort generator#

Let’s see what it does for a list of strings: my_list = Why sort by hand when we can leverage the high-level power of python? Naturally, python has a built in sort functionality that works by accepting a list and sorting it in place. Sort a List of Strings in Python Using the Sort Function We’d need to use something like the casefold function for better results. Notice how two of the words are exactly the same but separated in the list. In addition, with this method, we’d be performing a case-sensitive sort, so a list like will look something like after sorting. For instance, sorting is almost meaningless for Non-English character sets. Naturally, this solution has its drawbacks. The boolean operators work on strings directly in Python, so we don’t have to worry about writing our own loops to perform the comparison. For simplicity, we’ll leverage selection sort: my_list = Sort a List of Strings in Python by Brute ForceĪs always, we can try to implement our own sorting method. In this section, we’ll cover three of my favorite ways to sort a list of strings in Python. When it comes to sorting, there’s no shortage of solutions.

In this article, we’ll take a look at a few ways to sort a list of strings in Python. Naturally, I decided I wanted to sort this list to avoid any future issues. The list is in arbitrary order, and does not include the special entries '.' and '.' even if they are present in the directory. Return a list containing the names of the entries in the directory given by path.

To be sure, I took a peek at the os.listdir documentation, and it did not disappoint:

The expected list looked something like: įor whatever reason, the list was instead scrambled: Īs I dug into the code a bit, I discovered the following line of code: alphabetical_list = os.listdir(_dir)Īs we can see, we’re banking on the OS library to produce a list of directories in alphabetical order.

#Python sort generator#

Recently, I discovered a bug in my Sample Programs Wiki Generator code which caused the output wiki to occasionally display a list of strings in the wrong order.