(original) (raw)

hello

i was thinking about a possible improvement for the itemgetter
the documentation page shows simple examples like sorting a dictionary by its integer values, like this:

>>> inventory = [('apple', 3), ('banana', 2), ('pear', 5), ('orange', 1)]

>>> getcount = itemgetter(1)
>>> map(getcount, inventory)

[3, 2, 5, 1]
>>> sorted(inventory, key=getcount)

[('orange', 1), ('banana', 2), ('apple', 3), ('pear', 5)]

let's suppose i have dictionary where items are lists (instead of integers), and i want to sort it by the size of each list:

>>> friends = {
... 'alex': ['bob', 'jane'],
... 'mary': ['steve', 'linda', 'foo bar'],
... 'john': ['max']
... }
>>> sorted(friends.items(), key=itemgetter(1))

[('alex', ['bob', 'jane']), ('john', ['max']), ('mary', ['steve', 'linda', 'foo bar'])]

that doesn't work since itemgetter(1) will return a list, and that's not useful for sorting.

i didn't look at the code, but i suppose itemgetter is something like this:

class itemgetter:
    def __init__(self, index):
        self.index = index

    def __call__(self, item):
        return tem[self.index]

in order for that sort (and possibly a lot of other things) to work properly, we could add
a callback method for itemgetter, like this:

class itemgetter:
    def __init__(self, index, callback=None):
        self.index = index

        self.callback = callback

    def __call__(self, item):
        return self.callback and self.callback(item[self.index]) or item[self.index]

so, we could easly sort by the amount of data in each list, like this:

>>> sorted(friends.items(), key=itemgetter(1, callback=len))
[('john', ['max']), ('alex', ['bob', 'jane']), ('foo', ['bar', 'steve', 'linda'])]

what do you guys think about it? please correct me if i'm wrong.

--
Ship ahoy! Hast seen the While Whale?
- Melville's Captain Ahab