newbie question

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

Classified fed this fish to the penguins on Saturday 14 December 2002 
07:53 am:

> Hi, I'm new to python and I encounter a problem...
> I'm frustrated because the following code won't work...
> a=[('a',1),('c',5),('k',5),('o',3), ('i',3)]
> for i in range(0, len(a)-1):
> for j in range(1, len(a)):
> if a[i][1]>a[j][1]:
> a[i],a[j]=a[j],a[i]
> print a
> it appears that the bubble sort will not sort a...
> I guess I must have made a stupid mistake somewhere...
> I'm a newbie, I don't know how to use the debugger...
> thanks to whoever that can help me!

        Firstly, I don't think that is a bubble-sort algorithm; the inner loop 
is hitting the same data already processed. I'd need to spend some time 
studying to create the proper bubble sort, but the following seems more 
effective than yours: (unwrap the long first line)

a=[('a',1),('c',5),('k',5),('o',3), ('i',3), ('m', 1), ('n', 0), 
('z',2)]

for i in range(0, len(a)-1):
        for j in range(i+1, len(a)):
                if a[i][1]>a[j][1]:
                    print "swapping", i, j
                    print a
                    a[i],a[j]=a[j],a[i]
                    print a

print a

        The primary change I made is to run the inner loop from the outer 
loop+1, not from 1 on each pass.

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