How can I sort a list-of-lists by "column", i.e. ordering the lists by the ith element of each list?

For example:

a=[['abc',5],['xyz',2]]print sortByColumn(a,0)[['abc',5],['xyz',2]]print sortByColumn(a,1)[['xyz',2],['abc',5]]

You could use sort with its key argument equal to a lambda function:

sorted(a, key=lambda x: x[0])
[['abc', 5], ['xyz', 2]]sorted(a, key=lambda x: x[1])
[['xyz', 2], ['abc', 5]]

Another way would be to use key with operator.itemgetter, which creates the required lambda function:

from operator import itemgetter
sorted(a, key=itemgetter(1))
[['xyz', 2], ['abc', 5]]