sorting strings numerically while dealing with missing values
Ian Kelly
ian.g.kelly at gmail.com
Wed Dec 28 15:43:41 EST 2016
On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 2:14 PM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have a list containing a list of strings that I want to sort
> numerically by one of the fields. I am doing this:
>
> sorted(rows, key=float(itemgetter(sortby)))
I'm guessing that you left out a lambda here since the key argument
takes a function.
> Which works fine as long as all the sort keys convert to a float.
> Problem is that some are blank or None and those throw an exception.
> How can I handle that case and still sort? I'd want the blank or None
> fields to come out either at the beginning or end of the sorted list
> (not sure what the customer wants for this yet).
def sort_key(sortby, none_first=False):
def key(row):
try:
value = float(row[sortby])
except ValueError:
value = None
return ((value is None) != none_first, value)
return key
sorted(rows, key=sort_key(4, none_first=True))
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