[Zope-dev] case insensitive sorts

[Shane Hathaway]

Chris Withers wrote:
> 
> Dieter Maurer wrote:
> >
> > Chris Withers writes:
> >  > Andrew
> >  > bart
> >  > David
> >  > sophie
> >  > Wayne
> > Why in hell do you switch caseness for similar objects?
> 
> Who said anything about objects? I was just talking about lists of
> strings and in general, people prefer sorting based on the character to
> take precedence over sorting based on the case of that character.
> 
> Sadly, python's default sort does it the other way round :-(

This is not wrong.  Again, if the default sort tried to sort
case-insensitively, it would yield incorrect results for existing code
that sorts lists of strings containing data rather than text.  And
again, what you really want is a "textops" module that does something
like this:

def sort_strings(data):
  sortable_data = list(map(lambda s: (lower(s), s), data))
  sortable_data.sort()
  return map(lambda s: s[1], sortable_data)

Shane