Why should I use operator.itemgetter(x) instead of [x]?

Question

There is a more general question here: In what situation should the built-in operator module be used in python?

The top answer claims that operator.itemgetter(

Answer 1

As performance was mentioned, I've compared both methods operator.itemgetter and lambda and for a small list it turns out that operator.itemgetter outperforms lambda by 10%. I personally like the itemgetter method as I mostly use it during sort and it became like a keyword for me.

import operator
import timeit

x = [[12, 'tall', 'blue', 1],
[2, 'short', 'red', 9],
[4, 'tall', 'blue', 13]]


def sortOperator():
    x.sort(key=operator.itemgetter(1, 2))

def sortLambda():
    x.sort(key=lambda x:(x[1], x[2]))


if __name__ == "__main__":
    print(timeit.timeit(stmt="sortOperator()", setup="from __main__ import sortOperator", number=10**7))
    print(timeit.timeit(stmt="sortLambda()", setup="from __main__ import sortLambda", number=10**7))    

>>Tuple: 9.79s, Single: 8.835s
>>Tuple: 11.12s, Single: 9.26s

Run on Python 3.6