How do operator.itemgetter() and sort() work?

Question

I have the following code:

# initialize
a = []

# create the table (name, age, job)
a.append(["Nick", 30, "Doctor"])
a.append(["John&         


        

Answer 1

You are asking a lot of questions that you could answer yourself by reading the documentation, so I'll give you a general advice: read it and experiment in the python shell. You'll see that itemgetter returns a callable:

>>> func = operator.itemgetter(1)
>>> func(a)
['Paul', 22, 'Car Dealer']
>>> func(a[0])
8

To do it in a different way, you can use lambda:

a.sort(key=lambda x: x[1])

And reverse it:

a.sort(key=operator.itemgetter(1), reverse=True)

Sort by more than one column:

a.sort(key=operator.itemgetter(1,2))

See the sorting How To.