I probably should have known how to do this innately, it’s that simple, but I didn’t. So for the benefit of fellow feckless Pythonistas, here is how to sort a list of dictionaries based on a key in the dictionary.

Say I have a list of dictionaries where each dictionary represents data for a person who has a unique ID, so the list looks like this:

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peeps = [{'id':'1', 'name':'Christine'}, {'id':'2', 'name':'Steve'}]

To sort by id:

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peeps.sort(key=lambda peep: peep['id'])

TA DA!!!!!!!! Pretty impressive, right? Not really But here’s a wonderful article on Python sorting to make up for my unimpressiveness. Stay tuned, next week we’ll be learning to tie our shoes!