Sort a list by multiple attributes?

I'm not sure if this is the most pythonic method ... I had a list of tuples that needed sorting 1st by descending integer values and 2nd alphabetically. This required reversing the integer sort but not the alphabetical sort. Here was my solution: (on the fly in an exam btw, I was not even aware you could 'nest' sorted functions)

a = [('Al', 2),('Bill', 1),('Carol', 2), ('Abel', 3), ('Zeke', 2), ('Chris', 1)]  
b = sorted(sorted(a, key = lambda x : x[0]), key = lambda x : x[1], reverse = True)  
print(b)  
[('Abel', 3), ('Al', 2), ('Carol', 2), ('Zeke', 2), ('Bill', 1), ('Chris', 1)]

It appears you could use a list instead of a tuple. This becomes more important I think when you are grabbing attributes instead of 'magic indexes' of a list/tuple.

In my case I wanted to sort by multiple attributes of a class, where the incoming keys were strings. I needed different sorting in different places, and I wanted a common default sort for the parent class that clients were interacting with; only having to override the 'sorting keys' when I really 'needed to', but also in a way that I could store them as lists that the class could share

So first I defined a helper method

def attr_sort(self, attrs=['someAttributeString']:
  '''helper to sort by the attributes named by strings of attrs in order'''
  return lambda k: [ getattr(k, attr) for attr in attrs ]

then to use it

# would defined elsewhere but showing here for consiseness
self.SortListA = ['attrA', 'attrB']
self.SortListB = ['attrC', 'attrA']
records = .... #list of my objects to sort
records.sort(key=self.attr_sort(attrs=self.SortListA))
# perhaps later nearby or in another function
more_records = .... #another list
more_records.sort(key=self.attr_sort(attrs=self.SortListB))

This will use the generated lambda function sort the list by object.attrA and then object.attrB assuming object has a getter corresponding to the string names provided. And the second case would sort by object.attrC then object.attrA.

This also allows you to potentially expose outward sorting choices to be shared alike by a consumer, a unit test, or for them to perhaps tell you how they want sorting done for some operation in your api by only have to give you a list and not coupling them to your back end implementation.

A key can be a function that returns a tuple:

s = sorted(s, key = lambda x: (x[1], x[2]))

Or you can achieve the same using itemgetter (which is faster and avoids a Python function call):

import operator
s = sorted(s, key = operator.itemgetter(1, 2))

And notice that here you can use sort instead of using sorted and then reassigning:

s.sort(key = operator.itemgetter(1, 2))

Several years late to the party but I want to both sort on 2 criteria and use reverse=True. In case someone else wants to know how, you can wrap your criteria (functions) in parenthesis:

s = sorted(my_list, key=lambda i: ( criteria_1(i), criteria_2(i) ), reverse=True)