SORTING A LIST IN PYTHON
problem
You have a list of items in Python and you wish to sort them, e.g. put them in ascending order. If we assume we have a list of numbers, that would be from the lowest to the greatest (ascending), or vice versa (descending).
SOLUTION
Let’s assume we have the following list of integers.
numbers = [1,90,-22,891,87,44,22,2,4,3,2,1,0]
In order to sort the list, we can simply use the built-in function sort() as follows:
numbers.sort()
This will sort the items inside the list and update the list. It will not return a new list but will affect the current list.
So if we now print the list we can see the items are sorted in ascending order.
numbers = [1,90,-22,891,87,44,22,2,4,3,2,1,0]
numbers.sort()
print(numbers)
output
SORTING IN DESCENDING ORDER
Now, if we wish to sort the items of a list in descending order, i.e. from the greatest to the lowest, we can simply do it by passing a boolean parameter to the sort() function as follows:
numbers.sort(reverse=True)
If we go and print it now:
numbers.sort(reverse=True)
print(numbers)
output
reversing items
Now, if we wish to simply reverse the order of the items in the list we can use the reverse() function as follows:
items = ['one','two','three']
items.reverse()
It will reverse all the items in the list. If we go and print it now:
print(items)
output
conclusion
In this post we saw how simple it is to sort a list of data in Python. We can do both orders ascending and descending order out of the box.
Share it!
Ellion
Professional IT consultant, writer, programmer enthusiast interested in all sorts of coding.
Eats all cookies 🍪