Duncan Booth wrote: >>>> from operator import itemgetter >>>> data.sort(key=itemgetter(0)) >>>> data.sort(key=itemgetter(1)) >>>> data.sort(key=itemgetter(4)) >>>> data.sort(key=itemgetter(3)) Or, in Python 2.5: >>> data.sort(key=itemgetter(3, 4, 1, 0)) Peter