Question

I think this may be a rather simple question but I’ve searched other questions and haven’t really found anything completely relevant.

Say I have a list containing a number of strings like

mylist = [‘queen’, ‘jack’, ‘queen’, ‘king’, ‘jack’]

Now, I want to sort the strings in this list based on their relative values. So let’s say king = 3, queen = 2, jack = 1.

What is the simplest way to associate those values with the strings in the list and sort them accordingly?

Answer 1

Use a key lookup:

suits = {'queen': 2, 'jack': 1, 'king': 2}
l = ['queen','jack','king']
print sorted(l, key=suits.get)