Sorting list of lists by a third list of specified non-sorted order

Question

I have a list:

[[\'18411971\', \'kinase_2\', 36], [\'75910712\', \'unnamed...\', 160], ...

• about 60 entries long
• each entry

Answer 1

How about:

inputlist = [['18411971', 'kinase_2', 36], ['75910712', 'unnamed...', 160], ... # obviously not valid syntax
auxinput = aux = ['75910712', '18411971', ...] # ditto
keyed = { sublist[0]:sublist for sublist in inputlist }
result = [keyed[item] for item in auxinput]

There is no need to use sorting here. For large lists this would be faster, because it's O(n) rather than O(n * log n).

In case the keys aren't unique, it is possible to use some variant of an ordered dict (e.g. defaultdict(list) as per Niklas B's suggestion) to build the keyed representation.