Sarma Tangirala wrote: > I had a quick question on how string compare works. If did '1001' <= '999' > I get true. I know how the string compare works but I was wondering why it > were so. Why doesn't the string length factor into the comparison? For > example, If I compared character-by-character but also found how different > the lengths are, I could avoid a wrong logical answer as in the example > above. Any thoughts?
If you took the string length into acount you would get the "wrong logical answer" for strings that don't look like numbers: >>> number_strings = ["2", "20", "100", "1"] >>> sorted(number_strings, key=lambda x: (len(x), x)) ['1', '2', '20', '100'] >>> names = ["Abe", "Peter", "Pete", "Jim", "Jack"] >>> sorted(names, key=lambda x: (len(x), x)) ['Abe', 'Jim', 'Zoe', 'Jack', 'Pete', 'Peter'] There is no one sort order that fits all use cases, but Python makes it easy to supply a custom key function that fits your needs. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
