[Numpy-discussion] lexsort

[Tom Denniston]

This is great!  Many thanks Travis.  I can't wait for the next release!

--Tom

On 6/1/06, Travis Oliphant <oliphant.travis at ieee.org> wrote:
> Tom Denniston wrote:
> > This function is really useful but it seems to only take tuples not
> > ndarrays.   This seems kinda strange.  Does one have to convert the
> > ndarray into a tuple to use it?  This seems extremely inefficient.  Is
> > there an efficient way to argsort a 2d array based upon multiple
> > columns if lexsort is not the correct way to do this?  The only way I
> > have found to do this is to construct a list of tuples and sort them
> > using python's list sort.  This is inefficient and convoluted so I was
> > hoping lexsort would provide a simple solution.
> >
>
> I've just changed lexsort to accept any sequence object as keys.   This
> means that it can now be used to sort a 2d array (of the same data-type)
> based on multiple rows.  The sorting will be so that the last row is
> sorted with any repeats sorted by the second-to-last row and remaining
> repeats sorted by the third-to-last row and so forth...
>
> The return value is an array of indices.   For the 2d example you can use
>
> ind = lexsort(a)
> sorted = a[:,ind]   # or a.take(ind,axis=-1)
>
>
> Example:
>
>  >>> a = array([[1,3,2,2,3,3],[4,5,4,6,4,3]])
>  >>> ind = lexsort(a)
>  >>> sorted = a.take(ind,axis=-1)
>  >>> sorted
> array([[3, 1, 2, 3, 3, 2],
>       [3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 6]])
>  >>> a
> array([[1, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3],
>       [4, 5, 4, 6, 4, 3]])
>
>
>
> -Travis
>
>
>