Sorting two dimentional array by column?

[Tobiah]

>> Imagine an excel spreadsheet.  I can choose
>> a column and sort the records based on the items
>> in that column.  I would like to do the same
>> thing with a large two dimensional array.
>> What would be the fastest way (in computation time) 
>> to accomplish this?
> 
> Now that I think about the problem more, I really want
> to sort an array of dictionaries according one of the
> keys of each.  Could I use:
> 
> array.sort(key = something)
> 
> Where something looks at the proper item in the
> current row?  I can't quite visualize how to pull
> the item out of the dictionary.

Sorry to reply to myself so many times, but I have come
up with the answer:

from operator import itemgetter

thing = [
        {'animal': 'duck', 'tool': 'pond'},
        {'animal': 'dog', 'tool': 'bone'},
        {'animal': 'bear', 'tool': 'hive'}
]

get = itemgetter('animal')
thing.sort(key = get)

print thing

*****************************************

[
        {'tool': 'hive', 'animal': 'bear'},
        {'tool': 'bone', 'animal': 'dog'},
        {'tool': 'pond', 'animal': 'duck'}
]

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