Sort list by attribute of list

Question

I know that there are several posts regarding sorts of python lists, but I tried a large bunch of things and didn't accomplish to get what I want.

My code:

    list = []
    things = re.findall('<a class="th tooltip" data-rel=.*? href="(.*?)".*?>   <img src="(.*?)" alt="(.*?)" .*?', content, re.DOTALL)
for url, image, name in things:
    list.append({'url': url, 'image': image, 'name': name})

Now I want to sort this list by name. I found several posts which stated to use list.sort(key=) but I don't know what I should use for the key. Everything I tried resulted in a KeyError.

I'm sorry if I'm duplicating an already solved post, but I can't find the proper solution.

Thanks in advance.

Use a lambda function to map a list item `i` to `i['name']`, like so: `key=lambda i: i['name']` — Will Vousden, Jul 03 '15 at 10:00
@bereal use `operator.attrgetter('name')` or it won't work on objects that aren't subscriptable — Patrick, Nov 19 '17 at 11:51
@Patrick `attrgetter` won't work on dicts, and that's what we're dealing with in this case. — bereal, Nov 19 '17 at 11:53

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 03 '15 at 10:03

3

Use a lambda expression , lambda expression would get the dictionary as parameter, and then you can return back the name element from the dictionary -

lst.sort(key=lambda x: x['name'])

Also, please do not use the list as name of the variable, it will overwrite the built-in list function, which may cause issues when trying to use list(..) function.

answered Jul 03 '15 at 10:03

Anand S Kumar

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wow, thx.. I figured out that I sorted on the wrong place, therefore I got two sublists sorted as output. THX – conFusl Jul 03 '15 at 12:18
Use `key=attrgetter('name')` for better performance (import attrgetter from operator) – Patrick Nov 19 '17 at 11:51
`attrgetter` would not work in this , as we are working with dictionaries inside a list. But if you were going to do `getattr(x, 'name')` or `x.name` as key , then `attrgetter` would work . But don't really commend trying to optimize, unless you know this part is the bottleneck of the program. – Anand S Kumar Nov 20 '17 at 06:24

Sort list by attribute of list

1 Answers1