Sort: How to treat special character greater than alphabetical in Python 2?

Question

Currently Python sort() and sorted() gives me this:

>>> sorted(a, reverse=True, key=lambda s: re.sub('[\[\]]', '', s).lower())
[u'Category123', u'[Cat@123]', u'CAT']

But I need:

[u'[Cat@123]', u'Category123', u'CAT']

I want characters like: !@#$%^&* can be sorted as bigger than alphabetical chars. Thanks.

EDIT: Aside from the accepted answer, I figured out this would solve my problem:

>>> sorted(a, reverse=True, key=lambda s:s.upper())
[u'[Cat@123]', u'Category123', u'CAT']

Answer 1

Return two values from the key function, first one is going to be boolean checking whether any of the special characters exists in the string or not and second one the substituted string itself.

>>> def func(s):
    subbed = re.sub('[\[\]]', '', s).lower()
    return any(c in '!@#$%^&*' for c in s), subbed
...
>>> lst = [u'Category123', u'[Cat@123]', u'CAT']
>>> sorted(lst, reverse=True, key=func)
[u'[Cat@123]', u'Category123', u'CAT']

So, essentially we are sorting something like this:

>>> new_lst = [(False, 'category123'), (True, 'cat@123'), (False, 'cat')]
>>> sorted(new_lst, reverse=True)
[(True, 'cat@123'), (False, 'category123'), (False, 'cat')]