Sort Pandas dataframe by list size not A-Z

Question

I have a dataframe that looks like this:

username          group
user1             [A]
user2             [B, C]
user3             [A, B, C]
user4             [A, B]

I want the result to look like this:

username          group
user3             [A, B, C]
user4             [A, B]
user2             [B, C]
user1             [A]

I've looked up the documentation for sort_values and it seems to cover mainly 0-9 or A-Z sorting.. thanks in advance

Answer 1

One way is to create a new column with the lengths and then sort by that:

df['len'] = df['group'].str.len()
df.sort_values(by='len', ascending=False).drop(columns='len')

the output is:

    group       
2   (A, B, C)   
1   (B, C)      
3   (A, B)      
0   (A,)        

Answer 2

Just throwing it out there as an option:

df.reindex(df['group'].str.len().sort_values(ascending=False).index)