Drowning in a teacup?

[Michael Selik]

On Sat, Apr 2, 2016, 1:46 AM Vito De Tullio <vito.detullio at gmail.com> wrote:

> Fillmore wrote:
>
> > I need to scan a list of strings. If one of the elements matches the
> > beginning of a search keyword, that element needs to snap to the front
> > of the list.
>
> I know this post regards the function passing, but, on you specific
> problem,
> can't you just ... sort the list with a custom key?
>
> something like (new list)
>
>     >>> sorted(['no_a', 'yes_c', 'no_b', 'yes_z', 'no_y', 'yes_x'],
>     ...         key=lambda e: not e.startswith('yes'))
>     ['yes_c', 'yes_z', 'yes_x', 'no_a', 'no_b', 'no_y']
>
> or (in place)
>
>     >>> l = ['no_a', 'yes_c', 'no_b', 'yes_z', 'no_y', 'yes_x']
>     >>> l.sort(key=lambda e: not e.startswith('yes'))
>     >>> l
>     ['yes_c', 'yes_z', 'yes_x', 'no_a', 'no_b', 'no_y']
>

If the number of matches is small relative to the size of the list, I'd
expect the sort would be slower than most of the other suggestions.

>