Question

Given a list of words, return a list with the same words in order of
length (longest to shortest), the second sort criteria should be
alphabetical. Hint: you need think of two functions.

This is what I have so far:

def bylength(word1,word2):
    return len(word2)-len(word1)

def sortlist(a):
    a.sort(cmp=bylength)
    return a

it sorts by length but I don’t know how to apply the second criteria to this sort, which is by alphabetical descending.

Answer 1

You can do it in two steps like this:

the_list.sort() # sorts normally by alphabetical order
the_list.sort(key=len, reverse=True) # sorts by descending length

Python’s sort is stable, which means that sorting the list by length leaves the elements in alphabetical order when the length is equal.

You can also do it like this:

the_list.sort(key=lambda item: (-len(item), item))

Generally you never need cmp, it was even removed in Python3. key is much easier to use.