Sorting list alphabetically

[Peter Otten]

Igor Korot wrote:

> Hi, ALL,
> I need to perform a subj.
> Looking at the Google I found following thread with explanation:
> 
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36139/how-do-i-sort-a-list-of-strings-in-python
> 
> However, doing this in my python shell produces an error:
> 
> C:\Documents and Settings\Igor.FORDANWORK\My
> Documents\GitHub\webapp>python Python 2.7.5 (default, May 15 2013,
> 22:43:36) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>> import locale
>>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF-8')
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>   File "c:\python27\lib\locale.py", line 547, in setlocale
>     return _setlocale(category, locale)
> locale.Error: unsupported locale setting
>>>>
> 
> What is wrong with this?

The page you link to is pretty clear about it:
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF-8') # vary depending on your 
lang/locale

Sort order and encoding may vary from country to country, os to os, machine 
to machine. As the error message says, 'en_US.UTF-8' is not a locale 
supported on your machine. I suggest that you try using the default:

>>> import locale
>>> defaultlocale = locale.getdefaultlocale()
>>> defaultlocale
('de_DE', 'UTF-8')
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, defaultlocale)
'de_DE.UTF-8'
>>> encoding = defaultlocale[1]
>>> words = u"A a B b ä Ä".split()
>>> print "".join(sorted(words))
ABabÄä
>>> print "".join(sorted(words, key=lambda s: 
locale.strxfrm(s.encode(encoding))))
aAäÄbB