sorting ascending/descending with operator.attrgetter

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:05:24 -0700, Patrick Maupin wrote:

> You can provide a cmp function to the string sort method, e.g. cmp =
> lambda x,y: -cmp(x.a, y.a) or cmp(x.b, y.b)

String sort method?

>>> ''.sort
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'sort'
>>> import string
>>> string.sort
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'sort'

Did you mean list sort method?



> You can also possibly gain some efficiency by using key instead of cmp.

That is an impressive understatement. key is called once for every item, 
cmp is called once for every comparison. cmp has been dropped from Python 
3.x because its performance is poor.



-- 
Steven