case-insensitive list sorting, without lowercasing the result?

Question

In Python 3.3+ there is the str.casefold method that's specifically designed for caseless matching:

sorted_list = sorted(unsorted_list, key=str.casefold)

In Python 2 use lower():

sorted_list = sorted(unsorted_list, key=lambda s: s.lower())

It works for both normal and unicode strings, since they both have a lower method.

In Python 2 it works for a mix of normal and unicode strings, since values of the two types can be compared with each other. Python 3 doesn't work like that, though: you can't compare a byte string and a unicode string, so in Python 3 you should do the sane thing and only sort lists of one type of string.

>>> lst = ['Aden', u'abe1']
>>> sorted(lst)
['Aden', u'abe1']
>>> sorted(lst, key=lambda s: s.lower())
[u'abe1', 'Aden']

>>> x = ['Aden', 'abel']
>>> sorted(x, key=str.lower) # Or unicode.lower if all items are unicode
['abel', 'Aden']

In Python 3 str is unicode but in Python 2 you can use this more general approach which works for both str and unicode:

>>> sorted(x, key=lambda s: s.lower())
['abel', 'Aden']

You can also try this to sort the list in-place:

>>> x = ['Aden', 'abel']
>>> x.sort(key=lambda y: y.lower())
>>> x
['abel', 'Aden']

This works in Python 3 and does not involves lowercasing the result (!).

values.sort(key=str.lower)

In python3 you can use

list1.sort(key=lambda x: x.lower()) #Case In-sensitive             
list1.sort() #Case Sensitive