Question

I saw some examples using built-in functions like sorted, sum etc. that use key=lambda.

What does lambda mean here? How does it work?

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_{For the general computer science concept of a lambda, see What is a lambda (function)?.}

_{See also How are lambdas useful? for some discussion that no longer meets site standards but which you may find useful.}

Answer 1

A lambda is an anonymous function:

>>> f = lambda: 'foo'
>>> print(f())
foo

It is often used in functions such as sorted() that take a callable as a parameter (often the key keyword parameter). You could provide an existing function instead of a lambda there too, as long as it is a callable object.

Take the sorted() function as an example. It’ll return the given iterable in sorted order:

>>> sorted(['Some', 'words', 'sort', 'differently'])
['Some', 'differently', 'sort', 'words']

but that sorts uppercased words before words that are lowercased. Using the key keyword you can change each entry so it’ll be sorted differently. We could lowercase all the words before sorting, for example:

>>> def lowercased(word): return word.lower()
...
>>> lowercased('Some')
'some'
>>> sorted(['Some', 'words', 'sort', 'differently'], key=lowercased)
['differently', 'Some', 'sort', 'words']

We had to create a separate function for that, we could not inline the def lowercased() line into the sorted() expression:

>>> sorted(['Some', 'words', 'sort', 'differently'], key=def lowercased(word): return word.lower())
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    sorted(['Some', 'words', 'sort', 'differently'], key=def lowercased(word): return word.lower())
                                                           ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

A lambda on the other hand, can be specified directly, inline in the sorted() expression:

 >>> sorted(['Some', 'words', 'sort', 'differently'], key=lambda word: word.lower())
['differently', 'Some', 'sort', 'words']

Lambdas are limited to one expression only, the result of which is the return value.

There are loads of places in the Python library, including built-in functions, that take a callable as keyword or positional argument. There are too many to name here, and they often play a different role.