Sorting a 2D numpy array by multiple axes

Question

I have a 2D numpy array of shape (N,2) which is holding N points (x and y coordinates). For example:

array([[3, 2],
       [6, 2],
       [3, 6],
       [3,          


        

Answer 1

The title says "sorting 2D arrays". Although the questioner uses an (N,2)-shaped array, it's possible to generalize unutbu's solution to work with any (N,M) array, as that's what people might actually be looking for.

One could transpose the array and use slice notation with negative step to pass all the columns to lexsort in reversed order:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> a = np.random.randint(1, 6, (10, 3))
>>> a
array([[4, 2, 3],
       [4, 2, 5],
       [3, 5, 5],
       [1, 5, 5],
       [3, 2, 1],
       [5, 2, 2],
       [3, 2, 3],
       [4, 3, 4],
       [3, 4, 1],
       [5, 3, 4]])

>>> a[np.lexsort(np.transpose(a)[::-1])]
array([[1, 5, 5],
       [3, 2, 1],
       [3, 2, 3],
       [3, 4, 1],
       [3, 5, 5],
       [4, 2, 3],
       [4, 2, 5],
       [4, 3, 4],
       [5, 2, 2],
       [5, 3, 4]])