Question

I was working on a somewhat gimmick problem in regard to tuples and finally solved it… but I felt that my coding is really ugly. Is there any pythonic/more simple way? Basically, the question gives you a tuple and that you need to sort tuple, remove numbers from same tuple, and then create an output like this.

OUTPUT = [this, sentence, should, now, make, sense]

At beginning, you have…

t=[(4,'make'),(1,'sentence'),(0,'this'),(3,'now'),(5,'sense'),(2,'should')] 

My solution

t=[(4,'make'),(1,'sentence'),(0,'this'),(3,'now'),(5,'sense'),(2,'should')] 

def makeList(t):
    result = ''
    t.sort()
    for x, y in t:
        result += y +', '
    result = result[:-2]    
    result = ('[' + ', '.join([result]) + ']')
    return result 

OUTPUT: [this, sentence, should, now, make, sense] 

Answer 1

That’s easy:

sentence = [(4,'make'),(1,'sentence'),(0,'this'),(3,'now'),(5,'sense'),(2,'should')]
print "[%s]" % ', '.join(word for _,word in sorted(sentence))

There are several things to note here:

• A generator is used as an argument to join. The syntax is the same as for list comprehensions
• we iterate over the sorted list of tuples and use _ to denote that we don’t need the first value of the tuple (the number), but only the second part (the word)
• A C-style format string is used to build the final string with [] around it. We could also have used str.format here, but I think it looks cleaner this way (in this example)