Replacing cmp with key for sorting

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

Alan G Isaac:
> Probably not what you had in mind ...
> ...
>      >>> maxlen = max(len(si) for si in s)
>      >>> def k(si): return si+'z'*(maxlen-len(si))

This looks a little better:

assert isinstance(s, str)
sorted(s, key=lambda p: p.ljust(maxlen, "\255"))

If the string is an unicode that may not work anymore.
I don't know if there are better solutions.

Bye,
bearophile