How do you sort files numerically?

Question

First off, I\'m posting this because when I was looking for a solution to the problem below, I could not find one on stackoverflow. So, I\'m hoping to add a little bit to t

Answer 1

If you are using key= in your sort method you shouldn't use cmp which has been removed from the latest versions of Python. key should be equated to a function which takes a record as input and returns any object which will compare in the order you want your list sorted. It doesn't need to be a lambda function and might be clearer as a stand alone function. Also regular expressions can be slow to evaluate.

You could try something like the following to isolate and return the integer part of the file name:

def getint(name):
    basename = name.partition('.')
    alpha, num = basename.split('_')
    return int(num)
tiffiles.sort(key=getint)