natsort 2.0.1

Sort lists naturally

Natural sorting for python. natsort requires 2.7 or (2.6 with the argparse module). It has not been tested against python 3 or greater.

Synopsis

The natsort package provides a key helps sorts lists “naturally”; that is it sorts alphabetically and numerically, and not by ASCII. It provides support for ints and floats (including negatives and exponental notation) and basic support for sorting version numbers (1.2.3, no letters).

When you try to sort a list of strings that contain numbers, the normal python sort algorithm sorts by ASCII, so you might not get the results that you expect:

>>> a = ['a2', 'a8', 'a7', 'a5', 'a9', 'a1', 'a4', 'a10', 'a3', 'a6']
>>> sorted(a)
['a1', 'a10', 'a2', 'a3', 'a4', 'a5', 'a6', 'a7', 'a8', 'a9']

Notice that it has the order (‘1’, ‘10’, ‘2’)? This is because the list is being sorted in ASCII order, which sorts numbers like you would letters (i.e. ‘a’, ‘at’, ‘b’). It would be better if you had a sorting algorithm that recognized numbers as numbers and treated them like numbers, not letters. This is where natsort comes in:

>>> from natsort import natsorted
>>> a = ['a2', 'a8', 'a7', 'a5', 'a9', 'a1', 'a4', 'a10', 'a3', 'a6']
>>> natsorted(a)
['a1', 'a2', 'a3', 'a4', 'a5', 'a6', 'a7', 'a8', 'a9', 'a10']

natsort identifies the numbers and sorts them separately from the numbers. It not only works on integers, but on floats as well (even in exponential notation!):

>>> a = ['a50', 'a51.', 'a50.4', 'a5.034e1', 'a50.300']
>>> sorted(a)
['a5.034e1', 'a50', 'a50.300', 'a50.4', 'a51.']
>>> natsorted(a)
['a50', 'a50.300', 'a5.034e1', 'a50.4', 'a51.']

Last, natsort can also handle version numbers appropriately, provided they are in the format “M.m.p” where M=major version number, m=minor version number, and p=patch. The patch can be just a number, or can also be a number followed by a letter. You must include the patch, otherwise natsort will think it is a float:

>>> a = ['1.9.9a', '1.11', '1.9.9b', '1.11.4', '1.10.1']
>>> sorted(a)
['1.10.1', '1.11', '1.11.4', '1.9.9a', '1.9.9b']
>>> natsorted(a)
['1.9.9a', '1.9.9b', '1.10.1', '1.11.4', '1.11']
>>> # If you had used 1.11.0 instead of 1.11 this would work properly
>>> a = ['1.9.9a', '1.11.0', '1.9.9b', '1.11.4', '1.10.1']
>>> natsorted(a)
['1.9.9a', '1.9.9b', '1.10.1', '1.11.0', '1.11.4']

natsort is not necessarily optimized for speed, but it is designed to be as flexible as possible.

API

The natsort package provides three functions: natsort_key, natsorted, and index_natsorted.

natsort_key

Using natsort_key is just like any other sorting key in python:

>>> from natsort import natsort_key
>>> a = ['num3', 'num5', 'num2']
>>> a.sort(key=natsort_key)
>>> a
['num2', 'num3', 'num5']

natsorted

natsorted is simply a wrapper for sorted(list, key=natsort_key):

>>> from natsort import natsorted
>>> a = ['num3', 'num5', 'num2']
>>> natsorted(a)
['num2', 'num3', 'num5']

index_natsorted

Use index_natsorted if you want to sort multiple lists by the sorting of one list:

>>> from natsort import index_natsorted
>>> a = ['num3', 'num5', 'num2']
>>> b = ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']
>>> index = index_natsorted(a)
>>> # Sort both lists by the sort order of a
>>> a = [a[i] for i in index]
>>> b = [b[i] for i in index]
>>> a
['num2', 'num3', 'num5']
>>> b
['baz', 'foo', 'bar']

Shell Script

For your convenience, there is a natsort shell script supplied to you that allows you to call natsort from the command-line. natsort was written to aid in computational chemistry researh so that it would be easy to analyze large sets of output files named after the parameter used:

$ ls *.out
mode1000.35.out mode1243.34.out mode744.43.out mode943.54.out

(Obvously, in reality there would be more files, but you get the idea.) Notice that the shell sorts in ASCII order. This is the behavior of programs like find as well as ls. The problem is, when passing these files to an analysis program causes them not to appear in numerical order, which can lead to bad analysis. To remedy this, use natsort:

# This won't get you what you want
$ foo *.out
# This will sort naturally
$ natsort *.out
mode744.43.out
mode943.54.out
mode1000.35.out
mode1243.34.out
$ natsort *.out | xargs foo

You can also filter out numbers using the natsort command-line script:

$ natsort *.out -f 900 1100 # Select only numbers between 900-1100
mode943.54.out
mode1000.35.out

If needed, you can exclude specific numbers:

$ natsort *.out -e 1000.35 # Exclude 1000.35 from search
mode744.43.out
mode943.54.out
mode1243.34.out

For other options, use natsort --help.

It is also helpful to note that natsort accepts pipes, and also will sort each directory in a PATH independently of each other. Files in the current directory are listed before files in subdirectories.

Author

Seth M. Morton

History

11-21-2012 v. 2.0.1

• Reorganized directory structure

• Added tests into the natsort.py file iteself

11-16-2012, v. 2.0.0

• Updated sorting algorithm to support floats (including exponentials) and basic version number support

• Added better README documentation

• Added doctests