Sort a list in reverse order

Question

I have a list a = ['L', 'N', 'D']. I want to reverse the order of elements in a and get b = ['D', 'N', 'L']. I tried this:

a = ['L', 'N', 'D']
b = sorted(a, reverse=True)

But the output is

b= ['N', 'L', 'D']

Where do I make a mistake?

Answer 1

Your mistake is using sorted, which rearranges the list in order of the elements and ignores where the elements used to be. Instead use

b = a[::-1]

That runs through list a in reverse order. You also could use

b = list(reversed(a))

although the first version is faster.

Answer 2

If you want to use sorted(), you can specify that the index is the key to sort on:

b = sorted(a, key=a.index, reverse=True)