Question 6.9: Sorting a List You need to sort the elements of a list....

Raspberry Pi Cookbook: Software and Hardware Problems and Solutions [1540991]

Sorting a List

You need to sort the elements of a list.

Step-by-Step

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Use the sort Python language command:

>>> a = [“it”, “was”, “the”, “best”, “of”, “times”]
>>> a.sort()
>>> a
[‘best’, ‘it’, ‘of’, ‘the’, ‘times’, ‘was’]

Discussion

When you sort a list, you’ll actually be modifying it rather than returning a sorted copy of the original list. This means that if you also need the original list, you need to use the copy command in the standard library to make a copy of the original list before sorting it:

>>> import copy
>>> a = [“it”, “was”, “the”, “best”, “of”, “times”]
>>> b = copy.copy(a)
>>> b.sort()
>>> a
[‘it’, ‘was’, ‘the’, ‘best’, ‘of’, ‘times’]
>>> b
[‘best’, ‘it’, ‘of’, ‘the’, ‘times’, ‘was’]
>>>

See Also

All the recipes between Recipes 6.1 and 6.11 involve the use of lists.

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