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authorJuhana Jauhiainen <juhana.jauhiainen@gmail.com>2020-01-25 22:18:58 (GMT)
committerRaymond Hettinger <rhettinger@users.noreply.github.com>2020-01-25 22:18:58 (GMT)
commit8271441d8b6e1f8eae1457c437da24e775801d9f (patch)
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bpo-39374: Updated sorting documentation (GH-18177)
Diffstat (limited to 'Doc/howto')
-rw-r--r--Doc/howto/sorting.rst10
1 files changed, 6 insertions, 4 deletions
diff --git a/Doc/howto/sorting.rst b/Doc/howto/sorting.rst
index 1d6d5c4..a8efe65 100644
--- a/Doc/howto/sorting.rst
+++ b/Doc/howto/sorting.rst
@@ -43,16 +43,18 @@ Key Functions
=============
Both :meth:`list.sort` and :func:`sorted` have a *key* parameter to specify a
-function to be called on each list element prior to making comparisons.
+function (or other callable) to be called on each list element prior to making
+comparisons.
For example, here's a case-insensitive string comparison:
>>> sorted("This is a test string from Andrew".split(), key=str.lower)
['a', 'Andrew', 'from', 'is', 'string', 'test', 'This']
-The value of the *key* parameter should be a function that takes a single argument
-and returns a key to use for sorting purposes. This technique is fast because
-the key function is called exactly once for each input record.
+The value of the *key* parameter should be a function (or other callable) that
+takes a single argument and returns a key to use for sorting purposes. This
+technique is fast because the key function is called exactly once for each
+input record.
A common pattern is to sort complex objects using some of the object's indices
as keys. For example: