How to sort a list, only sorting strings?

Question

I have a list of strings and integers and want to sort the list, preserving the numbers like so

["Hello", 1, 2, "World", 6, "Foo", 3]

would become

["Foo", 1, 2, "Hello", 6, "World", 3]

In short, it only sorts the strings in the list, not the integers, which stay in place. I've tried using the key parameter with list.sort() but haven't managed to achieve what I want.

Can anyone help me with this?

EDIT: this is different to the linked question as I want to preserve the integers' indexes, rather than sort them along with the strings.

EDIT: this is different to the second linked question as answers from that question can solve the problem using the key parameter, something I have explicitly stated does not work in this instance.

Answer 1

Picked up this cool trick from @JonClements the other day.

Here goes:

gen = iter(sorted([x for x in lst if isinstance(x, str)]))
new_lst =  [next(gen) if isinstance(x, str) else x for x in lst]
print(new_lst)
# ['Foo', 1, 2, 'Hello', 6, 'World', 3]

Sort the strings separately and create a generator expression from the sorted strings. In a list comprehension, pick objects alternately from the gen. exp. using a ternary conditional if only the items in the original position is a string, otherwise, pick an item (an integer) from the initial list.