python 3: sorting with a comparison function

[Paul McGuire]

On Oct 10, 12:22 pm, prueba... at latinmail.com wrote:
> On Oct 10, 8:35 am, Kay Schluehr <kay.schlu... at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> > On 9 Okt., 22:36, bearophileH... at lycos.com wrote:
>
> > > Yes, that's a wonderful thing, because from the code I see around
> > > 99.9% of people see the cmp and just use it, totally ignoring the
> > > presence of the 'key' argument, that allows better and shorter
> > > solutions of the sorting problem.
>
> > Me too because I don't get this:
>
> > "key specifies a function of one argument that is used to extract a
> > comparison key from each list element: key=str.lower. The default
> > value is None."
>
> > Kay
>
> Don't know if further explanation is needed, but here is the deal:
>
> cmp is a function that receives two values and you return -1, 0 or 1
> depending if the first is smaller, equal or bigger. 99% of the time
> you will do some operation on the values that come in and then do a if
> statement with ">" or "<" and return -1,0,1.
>
> key is a function that receives one value and you return the value
> that you would normally compare against.
>
> Let me show an example:
>
> >>> data=[(4,'v'),(2,'x'),(1,'a')]
> >>> sorted(data)
>
> [(1, 'a'), (2, 'x'), (4, 'v')]
>
> OK, we sorted the data, but What if we want to sort by the letter
> instead of the number? Let's use cmp:
>
> >>> def comp(x, y):
>
>       key_of_x=x[1]
>       key_of_y=y[1]
>       if key_of_x < key_of_y:
>         return -1
>       elif key_of_x > key_of_y:
>         return 1
>       else:
>         return 0 #key_of_x == key_of_y
>
> >>> sorted(data,cmp=comp)
>
> [(1, 'a'), (4, 'v'), (2, 'x')]
>
> Very well, so how do we do this using key?
>
> >>> def keyfunc(x):
>
>       key_of_x=x[1]
>       return key_of_x
>
> >>> sorted(data,key=keyfunc)
>
> [(1, 'a'), (4, 'v'), (2, 'x')]
>
> Same output. Very good.
>
> (Of course a smart python developer would use the operator module so
> he doesn't even have to write keyfunc but this was just an example)
>
IIRC, the return values are not limited to -1, 0, and 1, but are more
like "any value less than 0", 0, and "any value greater than 0".  This
allows you to implement numeric cmp routines as:

def cmp(x,y):
  return x-y

or just:

cmp = lambda x,y: x-y

-- Paul