Sort list of strings ignoring upper/lower case

Question

I have a list which contains strings representing animal names. I need to sort the list. If I use sorted(list), it will give the list output with uppercase stri

Answer 1

New answer for Python 3, I'd like to add two points:

1. Use str.casefold for case-insensitive comparisons.
2. Use the method directly instead of inside of a lambda.

That is:

var = ['ant','bat','cat','Bat','Lion','Goat','Cat','Ant']

var.sort(key=str.casefold)

(which sorts in-place) and now:

>>> var
['ant', 'Ant', 'bat', 'Bat', 'cat', 'Cat', 'Goat', 'Lion']

Or, to return a new list, use sorted

>>> var = ['ant','bat','cat','Bat','Lion','Goat','Cat','Ant']
>>> sorted(var, key=str.casefold)
['ant', 'Ant', 'bat', 'Bat', 'cat', 'Cat', 'Goat', 'Lion']

Why is this different from str.lower or str.upper? According to the documentation:

Casefolding is similar to lowercasing but more aggressive because it is intended to remove all case distinctions in a string. For example, the German lowercase letter 'ß' is equivalent to "ss". Since it is already lowercase, str.lower() would do nothing to 'ß'; casefold() converts it to "ss".