How to sort a list of strings numerically?

I approached the same problem yesterday and found a module called natsort, which solves your problem. Use:

from natsort import natsorted # pip install natsort

# Example list of strings
a = ['1', '10', '2', '3', '11']

[In]  sorted(a)
[Out] ['1', '10', '11', '2', '3']

[In]  natsorted(a)
[Out] ['1', '2', '3', '10', '11']

# Your array may contain strings
[In]  natsorted(['string11', 'string3', 'string1', 'string10', 'string100'])
[Out] ['string1', 'string3', 'string10', 'string11', 'string100']

It also works for dictionaries as an equivalent of sorted.


You haven't actually converted your strings to ints. Or rather, you did, but then you didn't do anything with the results. What you want is:

list1 = ["1","10","3","22","23","4","2","200"]
list1 = [int(x) for x in list1]
list1.sort()

If for some reason you need to keep strings instead of ints (usually a bad idea, but maybe you need to preserve leading zeros or something), you can use a key function. sort takes a named parameter, key, which is a function that is called on each element before it is compared. The key function's return values are compared instead of comparing the list elements directly:

list1 = ["1","10","3","22","23","4","2","200"]
# call int(x) on each element before comparing it
list1.sort(key=int)

Tags:

Python

Sorting