Question

I am trying to sort two lists together:

list1 = [1, 2, 5, 4, 4, 3, 6]
list2 = [3, 2, 1, 2, 1, 7, 8]

list1, list2 = (list(x) for x in zip(*sorted(zip(list1, list2))))

Anyway, doing this gives me on output

list1 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6]
list2 = [3, 2, 7, 1, 2, 1, 8]

while I would want to keep the initial order for equal number 4 in the first list: what I want is

list1 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6]
list2 = [3, 2, 7, 2, 1, 1, 8]

What do I have to do? I wouldn’t want to use loop for bubble-sorting. Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

Use a key parameter for your sort that only compares the first element of the pair. Since Python’s sort is stable, this guarantees that the order of the second elements will remain the same when the first elements are equal.

>>> from operator import itemgetter
>>> [list(x) for x in zip(*sorted(zip(list1, list2), key=itemgetter(0)))]
[[1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6], [3, 2, 7, 2, 1, 1, 8]]

Which is equivalent to:

>>> [list(x) for x in zip(*sorted(zip(list1, list2), key=lambda pair: pair[0]))]
[[1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6], [3, 2, 7, 2, 1, 1, 8]]