Sorting strings in Python is something that you can almost take for granted if you do it all the time. Yet, it can become surprisingly tricky considering all the edge cases lurking in the vast Unicode standard. Understanding Unicode isn’t an easy feat, so prepare yourself for a whirlwind tour of surprising edge cases and effective ways of dealing with them.
Note: In this tutorial, you’ll often use the term Unicode string to mean any string with non-Latin letters and characters like emoji. However, strings consisting of Basic Latin letters also fall into this category because the underlying ASCII table is a subset of Unicode.
Python pioneered and popularized a robust sorting algorithm called Timsort, which now ships with several major programming languages, including Java, Rust, and Swift. When you call sorted() or list.sort(), Python uses this algorithm under the surface to rearrange elements. As long as your sequence contains comparable elements of compatible types, then you can sort numbers, strings, and other data types in the expected order:
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