Quickly alphabetize a large file via python

Question

#!/usr/bin/python

import random
import string

appendToFile = open("appendedFile", "a" )

# Generator

for i in range(1, 100000):

    chars = "".join( [random.choice(string.letters) for i in xrange(15)] )
    chars2 = "".join( [random.choice(string.letters) for i in xrange(15)] )

    appendToFile.write(chars + ":" + chars2 + "\n")

appendToFile.close()

Code modified from this question.

The above code generates 100,000 lines of random text in the format of STRING:STRING. Resultant text file is 3.1 MB.

How would one rapidly alphabetise the file, using the first STRING in STRING:STRING? Case is irrelevant.

Bubble sort is very slow, no?

Answer 1

The obvious first approach is simply to use the built-in sort feature in Python. Is this not what you had in mind? If not, why? With only 100,000 lines of random text, the built-in sort would be very fast.

lst = open("appendedFile", "rt").readlines()
lst.sort(key=str.lower)

Done. We could do it as a one-liner if you really wanted to:

lst = sorted(open("appendedFile", "rt").readlines(), key=str.lower)

EDIT: I just checked, and strings.letters includes both upper-case and lower-case letters. So, above code is modified to be case-insensitive.

EDIT: more on sorting in Python: http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowTo/Sorting