I have a list of strings, say ['ayyaaauu', 'shhasyhh', 'shaash'] and an accompanying order list ['s', 'y', 'u', 'h', 'a'].

I want to sort the list of strings using the order list in place of the normal alphabetical order used in sorting.

sorted(['ayyaaauu', 'shhasyhh', 'shaash']) would return ['ayyaaauu', 'shaash', 'shhasyhh'], sorting using alphabetical order.

I want the sort function to return ['shhasyhh', 'shaash', 'ayyaaauu'], which is the alphabet order specified in the order list.

Similar questions like this one are only useful if you only consider the first element of the string. I want to sequentially consider the entire string if the previous letters are the same.

P.S. In practice, I am generating the list of strings using letters from the order list, so all the letters in the strings have a "correct" order.

CodePudding user response：

You can use sorted(), and then generate the key parameter by using map() to map each letter to its priority (sorted() then uses tuple comparison to generate the ordering):

data = ['ayyaaauu', 'shhasyhh', 'shaash']
ordering = ['s', 'y', 'u', 'h', 'a']
priorities = {letter: index for index, letter in enumerate(ordering)}

result = sorted(data, key=lambda x: tuple(map(lambda y: priorities[y], x)))

# Prints ['shhasyhh', 'shaash', 'ayyaaauu']
print(result)