Sorting and Grouping Nested Lists in Python

Question

I have the following data structure (a list of lists)

[
 [\'4\', \'21\', \'1\', \'14\', \'2008-10-24 15:42:58\'], 
 [\'3\', \'22\', \'4\', \'2somename\', \'2         


        

Answer 1

It looks a lot like you're trying to use a list as a database.

Nowadays Python includes sqlite bindings in the core distribution. If you don't need persistence, it's really easy to create an in-memory sqlite database (see How do I create a sqllite3 in-memory database?).

Then you can use SQL statements to do all this sorting and filtering without having to reinvent the wheel.