How to sort a list of strings?

Question

What is the best way of creating an alphabetically sorted list in Python?

Answer 1

Old question, but if you want to do locale-aware sorting without setting locale.LC_ALL you can do so by using the PyICU library as suggested by this answer:

import icu # PyICU

def sorted_strings(strings, locale=None):
    if locale is None:
       return sorted(strings)
    collator = icu.Collator.createInstance(icu.Locale(locale))
    return sorted(strings, key=collator.getSortKey)

Then call with e.g.:

new_list = sorted_strings(list_of_strings, "de_DE.utf8")

This worked for me without installing any locales or changing other system settings.

(This was already suggested in a comment above, but I wanted to give it more prominence, because I missed it myself at first.)