Try a simple bubble sort. This will not have great performance on big files at a worst case scenario it will take n-1 loops to sort. This is not very general and would require a substantially different implementation.
def bublesort(l1,l2,l3): modified=True while modified: modified=False for number,value in enumerate(l3): if number>0:#to avoid index error if l3[number]<l3[number-1]: #move everything down one temp1,temp2,temp3=l1[number],l2[number],l3[number] l1[number],l2[number],l3[number]=l1[number-1],l2[number-1],l3[number-1] l1[number-1],l2[number-1],l3[number-1]=temp1,temp2,temp3 modified=True for number,value in enumerate(l1): print l1[number],l2[number],l3[number] bublesort([1,2,3,4], ['a','b','d','c'], ['yorkshire','detroit','kalamazoo','chicago']) Actually as I was writing this I thought of a better way using sort. l=[[1,2,3,4], ['a','b','d','c'], ['yorkshire','detroit','kalamazoo','chicago']] print l l=zip(l[0],l[1],l[2]) l.sort(lambda x,y:cmp(x[2],y[2])) for x in l: for y in x: print y, print Srinivas Iyyer wrote: >Dear Danny, thank you for ur help. But a basic >question ? > >In a table, more specifically a matrix 3X3, > >Apple Fruit Denmark >F-16 Fighter USA >Taj Wonder India >Mummy Antique Egypt > > >IF I have to sort on country, it should be > >Apple Fruit Denmark >Mummy Antique Egypt >Taj Wonder India >F-16 Fighter USA > > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor