Python: sorting string numbers not lexicographically

Question

I have an array of string-numbers, like:

numbers = [\'10\', \'8\', \'918\', \'101010\']

When I use sorted(numbers), I get them

Answer 1

You can transform the elements of the array to integers by using the built-in map function.

print sorted(map(int, numbers))

Output:

[8, 10, 918, 101010]

Answer 2

all elements types are string,

 >>> x=['4', '5', '29', '54', '4', '0', '-214', '542', '-64', '1', '-3', '6', '-6']
 >>> max(x)
 '6'

It "orders" the words alphabetically and returns the one that is at the bottom of the alphabetic list

Few more examples:

    >>> list1 = ['kyle', 'dhamu']
    >>> max(list1)
    'kyle'

returns kyle because k is after d

Also remember from python3.7 you cannot mix strings and integers to use max function. Below is the example

>>> mix_list = ['my', 'name', 'is', 1 ]
>>> max(mix_list)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: '>' not supported between instances of 'int' and 'str'

                                                                                                               

Answer 3

If you want to keep as strings you can pass int as the key to list.sort which will sort the original list:

numbers = ['10', '8', '918', '101010']
numbers.sort(key=int)

Answer 4

Here is how I like to do it, which is very fast.

print(sorted(sorted(numbers), key=len))

Answer 5

You can use the built-in sorted() function with a key int to map each item in your list to an integer prior to comparison:

numbers = ['10', '8', '918', '101010']
numbers = sorted(numbers, key=int)
print(numbers)

Output

['8', '10', '918', '101010']

Using this method will output a list of strings as desired.