Version number comparison in Python

Question

I want to write a cmp-like function which compares two version numbers and returns -1, 0, or 1 based on their compared va

Answer 1

This is a little more compact than your suggestion. Rather than filling the shorter version with zeros, I'm removing trailing zeros from the version lists after splitting.

def normalize_version(v):
    parts = [int(x) for x in v.split(".")]
    while parts[-1] == 0:
        parts.pop()
    return parts

def mycmp(v1, v2):
    return cmp(normalize_version(v1), normalize_version(v2))