Sorting Data With Python

Joe Tatusko
Joe Tatusko 9 Lessons 33m basics python

All programmers will have to write code to sort items or data at some point. Sorting can be critical to the user experience in your application, whether it’s ordering a user’s most recent activity by timestamp, or putting a list of email recipients in alphabetical order by last name. Python sorting functionality offers robust features to do basic sorting or customize ordering at a granular level.

In this course, you’ll learn how to sort various types of data in different data structures, customize the order, and work with two different methods of sorting in Python.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll know how to:

  • Implement basic Python sorting and ordering on data structures
  • Differentiate between sorted() and .sort()
  • Customize a complex sort order in your code based on unique requirements

For this course, you’ll need a basic understanding of lists and tuples as well as sets. Those data structures will be used in this course, and some basic operations will be performed on them. Also, this course uses Python 3, so example output might vary slightly from what you’d see if you were using Python 2.

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About Joe Tatusko

Joe is a manufacturing engineer turned Pythonista with interests in data wrangling and visualization.

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Participant Comments

Avatar image for davedanger

davedanger on Oct. 18, 2020

I’m taking an MIT EDX course (6.002.X) but Real Python is my goto for detailed explanation when and where needed. This helped me “sort” out some of the nuances that they glossed over in the lecture material. Thanks! Your tutorial is very well presented, and the key = lambda x:… explanation was what I needed for a current problem set.

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majid021 on Jan. 30, 2020

Thank you for explaining the difference between sort and sorted in detail with good examples. I was using both sort and sorted thinking that they don’t have much difference, but after watching i got really good idea when to use what.

Thanks Joe.

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Billiam on Jan. 7, 2020

Very nicely presented. Easy to understand and follow. Thanks Joe.

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Pakorn on Dec. 31, 2019

Great tutorial, very useful, esp. the common issues section.

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