Python: how to sort a list of strings by substring relevance?

Question

I have some list of strings, for example:

["foo bar SOME baz TEXT bob",
"SOME foo bar baz bob TEXT",
"SOME foo TEXT",
"         


        

Answer 1

See your friendly neighborhood sorting tutorial. You'll need a sort with a key. Here's a trivial function to give you the idea; it finds the distance between the two words, returning that as the difference metric.

sentence = ["foo bar SOME baz TEXT bob",
            "SOME foo bar baz bob TEXT",
            "SOME foo TEXT",
            "foo bar SOME TEXT baz",
            "SOME TEXT"]

def match_score(sentence):
    some_pos = sentence.find("SOME")
    text_pos = sentence.find("TEXT")
    return abs(text_pos - some_pos)

sentence.sort(key = lambda x: match_score(x))

for item in sentence:
    print(item)

Output:

foo bar SOME TEXT baz
SOME TEXT
foo bar SOME baz TEXT bob
SOME foo TEXT
SOME foo bar baz bob TEXT