How to sort multidimensional array by column?

Question

Is there a way to use the sort() method or any other method to sort a list by column? Lets say I have the list:

[
[John,2],
[Jim,9],
[Jason,1]
]

Answer 1

Yes. The sorted built-in accepts a key argument:

sorted(li,key=lambda x: x[1])
Out[31]: [['Jason', 1], ['John', 2], ['Jim', 9]]

note that sorted returns a new list. If you want to sort in-place, use the .sort method of your list (which also, conveniently, accepts a key argument).

or alternatively,

from operator import itemgetter
sorted(li,key=itemgetter(1))
Out[33]: [['Jason', 1], ['John', 2], ['Jim', 9]]

Read more on the python wiki.