How to use a custom comparison function in Python 3?

Question

Use the key keyword and functools.cmp_to_key to transform your comparison function:

sorted(x, key=functools.cmp_to_key(customsort))

Use the key argument (and follow the recipe on how to convert your old cmp function to a key function).

functools has a function cmp_to_key mentioned at docs.python.org/3.6/library/functools.html#functools.cmp_to_key

Instead of a customsort(), you need a function that translates each word into something that Python already knows how to sort. For example, you could translate each word into a list of numbers where each number represents where each letter occurs in your alphabet. Something like this:

my_alphabet = ['a', 'b', 'c']

def custom_key(word):
   numbers = []
   for letter in word:
      numbers.append(my_alphabet.index(letter))
   return numbers

x=['cbaba', 'ababa', 'bbaa']
x.sort(key=custom_key)

Since your language includes multi-character letters, your custom_key function will obviously need to be more complicated. That should give you the general idea though.

A complete python3 cmp_to_key lambda example:

from functools import cmp_to_key

nums = [28, 50, 17, 12, 121]
nums.sort(key=cmp_to_key(lambda x, y: 1 if str(x)+str(y) < str(y)+str(x) else -1))

compare to common object sorting:

class NumStr:
    def __init__(self, v):
        self.v = v
    def __lt__(self, other):
        return self.v + other.v < other.v + self.v


A = [NumStr("12"), NumStr("121")]
A.sort()
print(A[0].v, A[1].v)

A = [obj.v for obj in A]
print(A)

I don't know if this will help, but you may check out the locale module. It looks like you can set the locale to your language and use locale.strcoll to compare strings using your language's sorting rules.