Sorting a List of Strings by Length and Then Alphabetically in Python - working with Unexpected Results
I'm performance testing and I'm upgrading from an older version and I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm trying to sort a list of strings first by their length and then alphabetically, but I'm getting unexpected results with some string combinations. Here's the code I'm using: ```python words = ['apple', 'banana', 'pear', 'kiwi', 'fig', 'blueberry', 'grape'] # Sorting by length and then alphabetically sorted_words = sorted(words, key=lambda x: (len(x), x)) print(sorted_words) ``` I expected the output to be in order of their length first, and then in alphabetical order for the strings of the same length. However, I noticed that 'fig' appears after 'apple', which is not what I anticipated: ``` ['fig', 'kiwi', 'pear', 'apple', 'grape', 'banana', 'blueberry'] ``` The sorting seems to work for the majority of cases, but I need to figure out why 'fig' (length 3) is positioned after 'apple' (length 5). I've tried checking the lengths manually, and everything seems correct. Am I missing something in how `sorted()` works, or is there a better way to achieve this? I'm using Python 3.8.10 and would appreciate any insights or alternative approaches to this question. I'm working on a application that needs to handle this. I recently upgraded to Python 3.10. Is this even possible? I'm developing on Ubuntu 22.04 with Python. Am I approaching this the right way? Any examples would be super helpful. My development environment is Debian.