outputting a list in order of shortest word to longest word (python)

Question

Possible Duplicate:
how to sort by length of string followed by alphabetical order?

I want to create a program that prints the word in a list in order of shortest to longest character count. For example:

["My", "turtle", "is", "old"]

would output:

"My"
"is"
"old"
"turtle"

Is there any simple way to do this? I have so far:

message = "My turtle is old"
message = message.split(" ")

How is that at all representative of "in order of longest to shortest character count"? — mechanical_meat, Mar 28 '12 at 16:37
possible duplicate of [how to sort by length of string followed by alphabetical order?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4659524/how-to-sort-by-length-of-string-followed-by-alphabetical-order) and even more exact [Sorting Python list based on the length of the string](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2587402/sorting-python-list-based-on-the-length-of-the-string) which I found by googling "python sort by length". — agf, Mar 28 '12 at 16:40
How come the title is shortest to longest and the question is from longest to shortest ? Make up your mind :D — Kien Truong, Mar 28 '12 at 16:43

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 28 '12 at 16:38

4

l = ["My", "turtle", "is", "old"]
l.sort(key=len, reverse=True)
# -> ['turtle', 'old', 'My', 'is']

You might wish to review the Python wiki on the subject: http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowTo/Sorting

answered Mar 28 '12 at 16:38

mechanical_meat

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 28 '12 at 16:39

0

Sort the input by length using the key keyword for .sort():

l = ["My", "turtle", "is", "old"]
l.sort(key=len)

for i in l:
  print i

answered Mar 28 '12 at 16:39

Blender

2 Answers2