How to sort a list/tuple of lists/tuples by the element at a given index?

You can use the sorted() function with the key parameter to specify a function that extracts the element at the desired index.

Here's an example of sorting a list of tuples by the second element of each tuple:

an example of sorting a list of tuples by the second element of each tuple

my_list = [(1, 3), (4, 2), (3, 1)]

sorted_list = sorted(my_list, key=lambda x: x[1])

print(sorted_list)  # [(3, 1), (4, 2), (1, 3)]

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You can also use the itemgetter() function from the operator module as the key for sorting, it will be more efficient than lambda function

an example of sorting a list of tuples by the second element of each tuple by using the itemgetter function

from operator import itemgetter

my_list = [(1, 3), (4, 2), (3, 1)]

sorted_list = sorted(my_list, key=itemgetter(1))

print(sorted_list)  # [(3, 1), (4, 2), (1, 3)]

Note that the above examples will sort the list in ascending order. To sort in descending order, pass reverse=True as a parameter to the sorted() function.