Question

I have a question:
This is list of lists, formed by ElementTree library.

   [['word1', <Element tag at b719a4cc>], ['word2', <Element tag at b719a6cc>], ['word3', <Element tag at b719a78c>], ['word4', <Element tag at b719a82c>]]

word1..4 may contain unicode characters i.e (â,ü,ç).

I want to sort this list of lists by my custom alphabet.

I know how to sort by custom alphabet from here
sorting words in python

I also know how to sort by key from here http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowTo/Sorting

The problem is that I couldn’t find the way how to apply these two method to sort my “list of lists”.

Answer 1

Your first link more or less solves the problem. You just need to have the lambda function only look at the first item in your list:

alphabet = "zyxwvutsrqpomnlkjihgfedcba"

new_list = sorted(inputList, key=lambda word: [alphabet.index(c) for c in word[0]])

One modification I might suggest, if you’re sorting a reasonably large list, is to change the alphabet structure into a dict first, so that index lookup is faster:

alphabet_dict = dict([(x, alphabet.index(x)) for x in alphabet)
new_list = sorted(inputList, key=lambda word: [alphabet_dict[c] for c in word[0]])