Sorting List of Class Objects by their name(str) attribute with Turkish alphabetic order

Question

Hello I'm trying to sort Player class objects with their name stored as their attribute like this

class Player:
def __init__(self,license_no):
    self.license = license_no
    self.name = input('Oyuncunun adını ve soyadını giriniz: ').replace('ı','I').replace('i','İ').upper()
    self.fide_rating = get_ratings('Oyuncunun FIDE kuvvet puanını giriniz: ')
    self.national_rating = get_ratings('Oyuncunun ulusal kuvvet puanını giriniz: ')
    self.points = 0

I have these objects in a list and I want to sort this list by their name attribute. I can do it with an operator. all together with English alphabetic order just fine but I need to sort them by Turkish alphabet which has characters like 'Ç', 'Ö' etc. How can I do that any help is appreciated?

Can you also add the code on how you sort the english alphabet so it can give us an idea on what you are trying to achieve? — Andi Domi, Feb 06 '21 at 16:36
Does this answer your question? [Is there a standard way to sort by a non-english alphabet? For example, the romanian alphabet is "a ă â b c..."](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6056842/is-there-a-standard-way-to-sort-by-a-non-english-alphabet-for-example-the-roma) The top answer uses Turkish as an example — Stuart, Feb 06 '21 at 16:40
player_list.sort(key=lambda x: x.name) works fine with alphabetical sorting of the objects by their name value. But as I said, names starting with turkish characters are on the last part of list. — Ozan Okumuş, Feb 06 '21 at 16:40
Also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1097908/how-do-i-sort-unicode-strings-alphabetically-in-python — Stuart, Feb 06 '21 at 16:42
Stuart, that solution works fine if I have a list of strings as objects but my list is class objects and basically I want to use the method in that link on player.name attribute and sort the player objects list itself. — Ozan Okumuş, Feb 06 '21 at 16:43
I think using what Stuart has linked it can be used to create a solution — Maxwell Redacted, Feb 06 '21 at 16:48

Andi Domi · Answer 1 · 2021-02-06T19:20:24.807

Are you trying to go for something like this?

class S:
  def __init__(self, name):
    self.name = name


c = [S('ç'), S('a')]

# we create a dictionary with the index of the current object in the c list as key
# and name as value
name_to_sort= {}
for ind, obj in enumerate(c):
  name_to_sort[ind]=getattr(obj, 'name')

# in here we sort this dict in base of the values and create a list of list with [index, value]
sorted_by_name = [[k, v] for k, v in sorted(name_to_sort.items(), key=lambda name_to_sort: name_to_sort[1])]

# then in here we create a sorted list by sorting the indexes in the sorted_by_name
# and getting the original object which belonged to that index
sort = []
for ind, val in enumerate(sorted_by_name):
  sort.append(c[val[0]])

# we print the new list by the name
for i in sort:
  print(i.name)

output:

a
ç

I am looking for something like that but rather than printing and sorting the names itself I want to sort the objects themselves. like when you print the "c" list in your code you get objects, I want the final result that objects itself are sorted by their name attribute. — Ozan Okumuş, Feb 06 '21 at 17:00

Maxwell Redacted · Answer 2 · 2021-02-06T17:55:44.043

I believe I have solved it using this library called PyICU which was used here: How do I sort unicode strings alphabetically in Python?

import icu # pip install PyICU


collator = icu.Collator.createInstance(icu.Locale('gr_GR'))

letters="abcçdefgğhıijklmnoöprsştuüvyz" #Turkish alphabet


import random

not_names = []

## creating fake names and players 
for i in range(15):
  not_names.append(''.join([random.choice(letters) for a in range(5)]))

class Player:
  def __init__(self,license_no, name):
    self.license = license_no
    self.name = name

players = []

for idx, name in enumerate(not_names):
  players.append(Player(idx, name))

for player in players: print(player.license, player.name)

players.sort(key=lambda d: collator.getSortKey(d.name)) ## sorting done here
print('\n')

for player in players: print(player.license, player.name)

Ozan Okumuş · Accepted Answer · 2021-02-13T17:56:58.410

I have found my solution as I give an integer value for first char of the name. Then using it in a sorted func as key, it sorts the objects based on their name value by given function. Final answer is like below: EDIT: Edited the code by the following question that it only looks for first letter. Now it is looking for every character.

class Player:
    def __init__(self,name):
        self.name = name

    def __repr__(self):
        return f'Player(name={self.name})'


def name_sorting(player):
    chars = 'ABCÇDEFGĞHIİJKLMNOÖPRSŞTUÜVYZ'
    return [chars.index(player.name[i]) for i in range(len(player.name))]

player_list = [Player('Zeynep'),Player('Ahmet'),Player('Çınar'),Player('Oğuz')]
print(player_list)
print(sorted(player_list, key=name_sorting))

so what happens when you have two players with the same first letter? — Maxwell Redacted, Feb 07 '21 at 20:16

Iron Fist · Answer 4 · 2021-02-06T21:53:49.233

Another approach is using str.translate method, which builds a translation table between two sets of strings, like so:

>>> ascii_letters = 'abccdefgghiijklmnooprsstuuvyz'
>>> turkish_letters = 'abcçdefgğhıijklmnoöprsştuüvyz'
#Build the translation table, notice how I've added extra chars in second 
#string to account for special Turkish letters. Basically they should have 
#the same length
>>> turkishTable = str.maketrans(turkish_letters, ascii_letters)
>>> 
>>> s = 'Çınar'
>>> 
>>> s.lower().translate(turkishTable)
'cinar'
>>> player_list = ['Zeynep','Ahmet', 'Çınar', 'Oğuz']
>>> 

>>> sorted(player_list, key=lambda s: s.lower().translate(turkishTable))
['Ahmet', 'Çınar', 'Oğuz', 'Zeynep']

Then you can add another attribute in Player class and call it for example self.translated_name where you save the translated name and sort using this attribute with operator.attrgetter:

>>> from operator import attrgetter
>>> sorted(list_of_player_object, key=attrgetter('translated_name'))

Sorting List of Class Objects by their name(str) attribute with Turkish alphabetic order

4 Answers4