On Mon, 9 Feb 2004 15:25:26 -0500 (EST) Asad Habib <ahabib@engin.umich.edu> wrote:
Hello. Does anyone know what happens when you apply the list sort operation to a list that contains lists? In this case, what does Python use as the sort criteria? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
- Asad
It is similar to sorting a list of strings. See: http://www.python.org/doc/current/ref/comparisons.html """ Tuples and lists are compared lexicographically using comparison of corresponding elements. This means that to compare equal, each element must compare equal and the two sequences must be of the same type and have the same length. If not equal, the sequences are ordered the same as their first differing elements. For example, cmp([1,2,x], [1,2,y]) returns the same as cmp(x,y). If the corresponding element does not exist, the shorter sequence is ordered first (for example, [1,2] < [1,2,3]). """ hth, -Casey