Sorting a list

[John Salerno]

Hi everyone. If I have a list of tuples, and each tuple is in the form:

(year, text) as in ('1995', 'This is a citation.')

How can I sort the list so that they are in chronological order based on 
the year? Is there a better way to do this than making a list of tuples?

(So far I have a text file and on each line is a citation. I use an RE 
to search for the year, then put this year and the entire citation in a 
tuple, and add this tuple to a list. Perhaps this step can be changed to 
be more efficient when I then need to sort them by date and write a new 
file with the citations in order.)

Thanks.