I'm trying to think of the best way to go about this one, as the files I have to sort are *big*.
They're ASCII files with each row consisting of a series of fixed-length fields, each of which has a corresponding format file. (To be specific, these files are FirstLogic compatible.) I'm looking to sort files such that I can produce the 50,000 records with the highest "score" in a certain field. A grossly over-simplified example is: "JohnDoe 3.14123 Anywhere St." "MarySmith11.03One Jackson Pl. " ------------------------------------------------------------ >>> for x in people: # substituting 'people' for a file of records print x[9:14] 3.14 11.03 ------------------------------------------------------------ With this in mind, I'm trying to sort the file by the value of the number in the field represented by x[9:14] in the example here. I haven't yet figured out a way to apply sort() to this problem, although I'm certain the failing is my own. -Rob A. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor