Custom Python list sorting

As a side note, here is a better alternative to implement the same sorting:

alist.sort(key=lambda x: x.foo)

Or alternatively:

import operator
alist.sort(key=operator.attrgetter('foo'))

Check out the Sorting How To, it is very useful.

It's documented here.

The sort() method takes optional arguments for controlling the comparisons.

cmp specifies a custom comparison function of two arguments (list items) which should return a negative, zero or positive number depending on whether the first argument is considered smaller than, equal to, or larger than the second argument: cmp=lambda x,y: cmp(x.lower(), y.lower()). The default value is None.