In this tutorial, you will learn the different methods to alphabetically sort a list of strings in Python.
Let’s create a simple list of strings.
list_strings = ["ABC","GHI","JKL","DEF"]Output
["ABC","GHI","JKL","DEF"]
Different Methods to Sort list of strings alphabetically in python
Method 1: Using the sort() function
Invoke the sort() function on your list of strings to sort the string alphabetically.
list_strings = ["ABC","GHI","JKL","DEF"]
list_strings.sort()
print(list_strings)Output
['ABC', 'DEF', 'GHI', 'JKL']
Method 2: Use the sorted() function with key
The other method is the use of the sorted() function with the key. The key defines how the strings will be ordered. Here the lowercase for each strings will be used to sort them.
list_strings = ["ABC","GHI","JKL","DEF"]
sorted(list_strings,key=str.lower)Output
['ABC', 'DEF', 'GHI', 'JKL']
Method 3: Sorting the strings in descending order
The above two methods were sorting the list of strings in alphabetical order by default. Pass an extra parameter reverse=True to sort the strings in descending order.
list_strings = ["ABC","GHI","JKL","DEF"]
sorted(list_strings,reverse=True)Output
['JKL', 'GHI', 'DEF', 'ABC']
Complete code
# sort list of strings in python
print("Method 1","/n")
list_strings = ["ABC","GHI","JKL","DEF"]
list_strings.sort()
print(list_strings)
print("Method 2","/n")
list_strings = ["ABC","GHI","JKL","DEF"]
print(sorted(list_strings,key=str.lower))
print("Method 3","/n")
list_strings = ["ABC","GHI","JKL","DEF"]
print(sorted(list_strings,reverse=True))Output
Conclusion
In this tutorial, you have learned the two methods to sort the list of strings alphabetically. The first method used the sort() function and the second method used the sorted() method. These two methods were sorting the list of strings in ascending order. You can pass an extra parameter reverse() to sort the list of strings in descending order.
