Sorting a list

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

John Salerno a écrit :
> Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
> 
>> You don't tell how these lines are formatted, but it's possible that 
>> you don't even need a regexp here. But wrt/ sorting, the list of 
>> tuples with the sort key as first element is one of the best solutions.
> 
> 
> Ah, so simply using sort() will default to the first element of each tuple?

Yes. Then on the second value if the first compares equal, etc...

> The citations are like this:
> 
> lastname, firstname. (year). title. other stuff.

Then you theoretically don't even need regexps:

 >>> line = "lastname, firstname. (year). title. other stuff."
 >>> line.split('.')[1].strip().strip('()')
'year'

But since you may have a dot in the "lastname, firstname" part, I'd 
still go for a regexp here just to make sure.