How to sort a list of lists by a specific index of the inner list?

Question

I have a list of lists. For example,

[
[0,1,\'f\'],
[4,2,\'t\'],
[9,4,\'afsd\']
]

If I wanted to sort the outer list by the string field o

Answer 1

This is a job for itemgetter

>>> from operator import itemgetter
>>> L=[[0, 1, 'f'], [4, 2, 't'], [9, 4, 'afsd']]
>>> sorted(L, key=itemgetter(2))
[[9, 4, 'afsd'], [0, 1, 'f'], [4, 2, 't']]

It is also possible to use a lambda function here, however the lambda function is slower in this simple case