Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

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So far, we've only sorted and looked up the entries themselves, but in many cases you will have complex objects where you are interested in sorting and searching for a specific property of an object.

For example, you might have a list of people and you want to sort by their names:

class Person:
    def __init__(self, name, surname):
        self.name = name
        self.surname = surname
    def __repr__(self):
        return '<Person: %s %s>' % (self.name, self.surname)

people = [Person('Derek', 'Zoolander'),
          Person('Alex', 'Zanardi'),
          Person('Vito', 'Corleone')
          Person('Mario', 'Rossi')]

Sorting those people by name can be done by relying on the key argument of the sorted function, which specifies a callable that should return the value for which the entry ...