Sort list by given order of indices

Question

I have a list of lines read from a file. I need to sort the list by time stamp. I have parsed out the time stamp using regular expressions and place them into a separate list. T

Answer 1

I think you could do

[line for (time,line) in sorted(zip(listofTimes, listofLines))]

But if you have (or could write) a function to automatically extract the time from the line,

def extract_time(line):
    ...
    return time

you could also do

listofLines.sort(key=extract_time)

or if you want to keep the original list intact,

sorted(listofLines, key=extract_time)