Python Sorting

Python sorting concept helps you to arrange the values in a specific order there are various sorting mechanisms in python out of which merge sort is mostly used.

In this blog as a beginners guide on sorting let us discuss on ascending or descending ways of sorting. So what is the use of these ordering ??

In real time scenarios when you want to arrange the things in a proper way it will be easy to arrange data of limited size but when there is a huge data it’s almost difficult to sort.

Sorting again is depend on various factors in shopping apps we can sort products by availability , price, offers so on.. These sorting help us to identify the products easily.

Arranging a set of students data according to there roll no is one of the example we can consider. There are several sorting algorithms available, each with its advantages and disadvantages, depending on the specific use case.

The choice of which sorting algorithm to use depends on the specific use case and the properties of the input data.

So now let us see how this thing works with the help of a example where we have list of numbers and we arrange it in this blog on python sorting let us see ascending order, descending order with functions declared.

Ascending Order :

Specifying sort will by default make it ascending order i.e., from lower value to higher value as shown below.

Ascending order refers to the arrangement of elements in increasing order. For example, if you have a list of numbers then [ 1,2,4,5 ], arranging them in ascending order means that the new list would be [ 4,2,5,1 ].

In programming, sorting a list of elements in ascending order is a common operation. In Python, you can use the built-in sort() method or the sorted() function to sort a list in ascending order.

a = [ 4, 2, 5, 1 ]

a.sort()

output :

[ 1, 2, 4, 5 ]

Descending Order :

Specify the reverse = true to order the list of variables from higher value to lower value i.e., descending order then print it.

Descending order refers to the arrangement of elements in decreasing order. For example, if you have a list of numbers [ 4, 2, 5, 1 ], arranging them in descending order means that the new list would be [ 5, 4, 2, 1 ].

a = [ 4, 2, 5, 1 ]

a.sort( reverse = True  ) 

print( a )

output :

[ 5, 4, 2, 1 ]

Not only numbers we can also sort alphabets and also words with this sorting mechanism

b = [ 'b', 'a', 'z', 'g' ]

b.sort( ) 

print( b )

output :

[ 'a', 'b', 'j', 'z' ]

Python Sorting Function :

We can create a sorting function such that it returns the length. This is just an example you can create your own functions based on your requirement.

Python provides a built-in sorting function sorted() that can be used to sort a list of elements in ascending or descending order. The sorted() function returns a new list with the sorted elements, leaving the original list unmodified.

def sortfunction(e) :
       return len(e)

Python Sorting Video Tutorial :

Implementation of this function is clearly explained in the video tutorial below go through it.

If you have any query’s in this tutorial on python sorting do let us know in the comment section below. If you like this tutorial do like and share us for more interesting updates..