how to sort a mixed string with numbers

Question

I am trying to sort a list of strings:

l = ['img1','img2','img11','img3']

I tried this:

l.sort()
>>>['img1', 'img11', 'img2', 'img3']

but the result is not what I want. how can I sort the list so that i get the results below:

['img1', 'img2', 'img3', 'img11']

Answer 1

You can use the key feature in the sorted method. Here re is used to get the integer from the string.

In [1]: import re

In [2]: sorted(l, key=lambda x: int(re.search(r'\d+', x).group()))
Out[2]: ['img1', 'img2', 'img3', 'img11']