lexicographic-ordering

I have a list which contains strings representing animal names. I need to sort the list. If I use sorted(list) , it will give the list output with uppercase strings first and then lowercase. But I need the below output. Input: var = ['ant','bat','cat','Bat','Lion','Goat','Cat','Ant'] Output: ['ant', 'Ant', 'bat', 'Bat', 'cat', 'Cat', 'Goat', 'Lion'] The sort() method and the sorted() function take a key argument: var.sort(key=lambda v: v.upper()) The function named in key is called for each value and the return value is used when sorting, without affecting the actual values: >>> var=['ant',

What does "compare two strings lexicographically" mean? Leading from answers from @Bozho and @aioobe, lexicographic comparisons are similar to the ordering that one might find in a dictionary. The Java String class provides the .compareTo () method in order to lexicographically compare Strings. It is used like this "apple".compareTo ("banana") . The return of this method is an int which can be interpreted as follows: returns < 0 then the String calling the method is lexicographically first (comes first in a dictionary) returns == 0 then the two strings are lexicographically equivalent returns