Sort an array in python

J_Szucs · 06-14-2008, 09:10 AM

I am a green noob to python, and it looks like I cannot find a solution myself

I have a two-dimensional array like this (sorry but for some reason I cannot not produce square brackets in firefox to describe the arrays correctly - but that's an other issue):
dist(0)(0) = 25
dist(0)(1) = 1
dist(1)(0) = 12
dist(1)(1) = 2
dist(2)(0) = 11
dist(2)(1) = 3

Basically, column0 of the array contains values, column1 contains indexes.

What I want to do is to sort the above array on the values (column0), and then keep only the first (say) two rows, like this:

dist(0)(0) = 11
dist(0)(1) = 3
dist(1)(0) = 12
dist(1)(1) = 2

I just cannot find any simple methods to sort an array like this, and the examples I found in the python docs (e.g. with itemgetter) do not seem to work for me...

ntubski · 06-14-2008, 05:02 PM

Code:

>>> dist = [[25, 1],                                                                                                                                                                                               
            [12, 2],                                                                                                                                                                                                   
            [11, 3]]
... ... >>> 
>>> dist.sort(key=lambda a: a[0]) # key function only looks at first element in row ie column 0
>>> dist
[[11, 3], [12, 2], [25, 1]]
>>> dist = dist[0:2]  # take only the first 2 rows
>>> dist
[[11, 3], [12, 2]]

EDIT: I looked up that itemgetter thing, you can replace lamba a: a[0] with operator.itemgetter(0) (after importing operator), if you care about efficiency.

J_Szucs · 06-15-2008, 03:48 AM

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "im.py", line 37, in ?
dist.sort(key=lambda a: a[0])
AttributeError: sort

With the operator.itemgetter(0) thingy, strings like "array(0)(0) array(0)(1) ..." seem to replace the original elements of the array, and that's not the right behaviour, either

Here are the modules the script imports:
import Image
from Numeric import *
import operator

Should it import something more for the lambda thingy to work?

In the meantime I inserted the good old sorting algorithm into the python script, but that works badly slowly with the array (in real life the array has 80 rows and 2 colums, and there are 180 such arrays to sort)...

ntubski · 06-15-2008, 04:33 PM

Can you post your code, it's difficult to figure out what your problem is otherwise.

What version do you have (output from python --version)? from http://docs.python.org/lib/typesseq-...pesseq-mutable

Quote:

Changed in version 2.4: Support for key and reverse was added.

If you have an earlier version,

Code:

dist.sort(cmp=lambda x y: cmp(x[0], y[0]))

should still work. A bit slower, but probably still faster than "the good old sorting algorithm(bubblesort?)".