Why does Python sort put upper case items first?

Question

Not looking for a work around. Looking to understand why Python sorts this way.

>>> a = [\'aaa\',\'Bbb\']
>>> a.sort()
>>> print(a         


        

Answer 1

str is sorted based on the raw byte values (Python 2) or Unicode ordinal values (Python 3); in ASCII and Unicode, all capital letters have lower values than all lowercase letters, so they sort before them:

>>> ord('A'), ord('Z')
(65, 90)
>>> ord('a'), ord('z')
(97, 112)

Some locales (e.g. en_US) will change this sort ordering; if you pass locale.strxfrm as the key function, you'll get case-insensitive sorts on those locales, e.g.

>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_COLLATE, 'en_US.utf-8')
>>> a.sort(key=locale.strxfrm)
>>> a
['aaa', 'Bbb']