I didn't think this would be as difficult as it now seems to me. I am reading in a csv file that documents a bunch of different info on about 200 books, such as title, author, publisher, isbn, date and several other bits of info too.
I can do a simple sort over the first field (title as it turns out), and that is fine as far as it gets: import string bookData = open(r'D:\path\to\books.csv', 'r') sBookData = bookData.read() lBooks = string.split(sBookData, '\n') lBooks.sort() sorted = string.join(lBooks, '\n') output = open(r'D:\path\to\output.csv', 'w') output.close() I really want to be able to sort the list of books based on other criterium, and even multiple criteria (such as by author, and then by date.) I am using python 2.4 and have found this site: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/305304 and so I tried doing things like >>>lBooks.sort(cmp=cmp5) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ? NameError: name 'cmp5' is not defined (I was hoping that cmp5 meant it would use the 5th item in the lists to sort across) >>> lBooks.sort(key=lambda i:i[4]) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ? File "<interactive input>", line 1, in <lambda> IndexError: string index out of range (I was hoping for similar things) would you be so kind as to point me in the right direction? THanks! googleboy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
