Python .sort() not working as expected

Question

Tackling a few puzzle problems on a quiet Saturday night (wooohoo... not) and am struggling with sort(). The results aren\'t quite what I expect. The program iterates throug

Answer 1

You have your numbers stored as strings, so python is sorting them accordingly. So: '101x' comes before '102x' (the same way that 'abcd' will come before 'az').

Answer 2

Sort is doing its job. If you intended to store integers in the list, take Lukáš advice. You can also tell sort how to sort, for example by making ints:

list.sort(key=int)

the key parameter takes a function that calculates an item to take the list object's place in all comparisons. An integer will compare numerically as you expect.

(By the way, list is a really bad variable name, as you override the builtin list() type!)