Sorting and Grouping Nested Lists in Python

Question

I have the following data structure (a list of lists)

[
 [\'4\', \'21\', \'1\', \'14\', \'2008-10-24 15:42:58\'], 
 [\'3\', \'22\', \'4\', \'2somename\', \'2         


        

Answer 1

For the first question, the first thing you should do is sort the list by the second field using itemgetter from the operator module:

x = [
 ['4', '21', '1', '14', '2008-10-24 15:42:58'], 
 ['3', '22', '4', '2somename', '2008-10-24 15:22:03'], 
 ['5', '21', '3', '19', '2008-10-24 15:45:45'], 
 ['6', '21', '1', '1somename', '2008-10-24 15:45:49'], 
 ['7', '22', '3', '2somename', '2008-10-24 15:45:51']
]

from operator import itemgetter

x.sort(key=itemgetter(1))

Then you can use itertools' groupby function:

from itertools import groupby
y = groupby(x, itemgetter(1))

Now y is an iterator containing tuples of (element, item iterator). It's more confusing to explain these tuples than it is to show code:

for elt, items in groupby(x, itemgetter(1)):
    print(elt, items)
    for i in items:
        print(i)

Which prints:

21 <itertools._grouper object at 0x511a0>
['4', '21', '1', '14', '2008-10-24 15:42:58']
['5', '21', '3', '19', '2008-10-24 15:45:45']
['6', '21', '1', '1somename', '2008-10-24 15:45:49']
22 <itertools._grouper object at 0x51170>
['3', '22', '4', '2somename', '2008-10-24 15:22:03']
['7', '22', '3', '2somename', '2008-10-24 15:45:51']

For the second part, you should use list comprehensions as mentioned already here:

from pprint import pprint as pp
pp([y for y in x if y[3] == '2somename'])

Which prints:

[['3', '22', '4', '2somename', '2008-10-24 15:22:03'],
 ['7', '22', '3', '2somename', '2008-10-24 15:45:51']]

Answer 2

If you'll be doing a lot of sorting and filtering, you may like some helper functions.

m = [
 ['4', '21', '1', '14', '2008-10-24 15:42:58'], 
 ['3', '22', '4', '2somename', '2008-10-24 15:22:03'], 
 ['5', '21', '3', '19', '2008-10-24 15:45:45'], 
 ['6', '21', '1', '1somename', '2008-10-24 15:45:49'], 
 ['7', '22', '3', '2somename', '2008-10-24 15:45:51']
]

# Sort and filter helpers.
sort_on   = lambda pos:     lambda x: x[pos]
filter_on = lambda pos,val: lambda l: l[pos] == val

# Sort by second column
m = sorted(m, key=sort_on(1))

# Filter on 4th column, where value = '2somename'
m = filter(filter_on(3,'2somename'),m)