Sorting and spaces.

[MRAB]

On 2018-05-31 15:18, Tobiah wrote:
> I had a case today where I needed to sort two string:
> 
> 	['Awards', 'Award Winners']
> 
> I consulted a few sources to get a suggestion as to
> what would be correct.  My first idea was to throw them
> through a Linux command line sort:
> 
> 	Awards
> 	Award Winners
> 
> Then I did some Googling, and found that most US systems seem
> to prefer that one ignore spaces when alphabetizing.  The sort
> program seemed to agree.
> 
> I put the items into the database that way, but I had forgotten
> that my applications used python to sort them anyway.  The result
> was different:
> 
> 	>>> a = ['Awards', 'Award Winners']
> 	>>> sorted(a)
> 	['Award Winners', 'Awards']
> 
> So python evaluated the space as a lower ASCII value.
> 
> Thoughts?  Are there separate tools for alphabetizing
> rather then sorting?
> 
You could split the string first:
 >>> a = ['Awards', 'Award Winners']
 >>> sorted(a, key=str.split)
['Award Winners', 'Awards']

If you want it to be case-insensitive:

 >>> sorted(a, key=lambda s: s.lower().split())
['Award Winners', 'Awards']