Alphabetizing?

[Erik Max Francis]

Lee Harr wrote:

> How about just sort()ing them?
> 
> You can define a custom sort function if you want an
> alphabetical rather than lexical sort. ie:
	...
> def sort_alpha(a, b):
>     if a.lower() < b.lower():
>         return -1
>     elif a.lower() > b.lower():
>         return 1
>     else:
>         return 0
> 
> words.sort(sort_alpha)

You've got the right approach (sorting based on a signature derived from
the string, rather than the string itself), although to be picky this
isn't yet an alphabetic sort, since it should be stripping away
non-alphabetic characters:

>>> sort_alpha("where's", "whereas")
-1

Of course this starts to get into questions of what you consider a word
or not, but a true alphabetic sort would remove non-alphabetic
characters first.  You can do this easily enough with string.maketrans
and S.translate.

-- 
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