How to Sort a list Alphabetically in Python

John on April 28, 2021

An alphabetically sorted list will contain all uppercase letters first and lowercase second in the order of the English alphabet.

In Python, we can sort a list alphabetically using the native sorted() function. Pass the list to sort as the first argument and store the output in a variable as sorted() does not modify the original list.

items = ['c', 'C', 'b', 'a', 'd', 'B']

sorted_items = sorted(items)

print(sorted_items)

['B', 'C', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd']

Ignore Case When sorting a List

The Python sorted() function takes an optional second argument key which we can use to make a case insensitive sort. To this, we will set the value of the key= to str.lower.

items = ['c', 'C', 'b', 'a', 'd', 'B']

sorted_items = sorted(items, key=str.lower)

print(sorted_items)

['a', 'b', 'B', 'c', 'C', 'd']

In the above example, each element in the list is evaluated in its lowercase form.