case-insensitive list sorting, without lowercasing the result?

I have a list of strings like this:

['Aden', 'abel']

I want to sort the items, case-insensitive. So I want to get:

['abel', 'Aden']

But I get the opposite with sorted() or list.sort(), because uppercase appears before lowercase.

How can I ignore the case? I've seen solutions which involves lowercasing all list items, but I don't want to change the case of the list items.

In Python 3.3+ there is the str.casefold method that's specifically designed for caseless matching:

sorted_list = sorted(unsorted_list, key=str.casefold)

In Python 2 use lower():

sorted_list = sorted(unsorted_list, key=lambda s: s.lower())

It works for both normal and unicode strings, since they both have a lower method.

In Python 2 it works for a mix of normal and unicode strings, since values of the two types can be compared with each other. Python 3 doesn't work like that, though: you can't compare a byte string and a unicode string, so in Python 3 you should do the sane thing and only sort lists of one type of string.

>>> lst = ['Aden', u'abe1']
>>> sorted(lst)
['Aden', u'abe1']
>>> sorted(lst, key=lambda s: s.lower())
[u'abe1', 'Aden']

>>> x = ['Aden', 'abel']
>>> sorted(x, key=str.lower) # Or unicode.lower if all items are unicode
['abel', 'Aden']

In Python 3 str is unicode but in Python 2 you can use this more general approach which works for both str and unicode:

>>> sorted(x, key=lambda s: s.lower())
['abel', 'Aden']