Title: Sort A List Of Names By Last Name
Slug: sort_a_list_by_last_name
Summary: Sort A List Of Names By Last Name
Date: 2016-06-25 12:00
Category: Python
Tags: Data Wrangling
Authors: Chris Albon

Create a list of names



In [1]:

    
commander_names = ["Alan Brooke", "George Marshall", "Frank Jack Fletcher", "Conrad Helfrich", "Albert Kesselring"]

Sort Alphabetically By Last Name

To complete the sort, we will combine three operations:

lambda x: x.split(" "), which is a function that takes a string x and breaks it up along each blank space. This outputs a list.
[-1], which takes the last element of a list.
sorted(), which sorts a list.



In [2]:

    
# Sort a variable called 'commander_names' by the last elements of each name.
sorted(commander_names, key=lambda x: x.split(" ")[-1])









    Out[2]:





['Alan Brooke',
 'Frank Jack Fletcher',
 'Conrad Helfrich',
 'Albert Kesselring',
 'George Marshall']