Natural Multi Sort | Python Fiddle

# This example provides a way to sort a list of dictionaries by multiple keys with a natural sort
# This can be very useful if you need to sort a result set from a database on more than one column
# Thanks to Ned Batchelder for the natural sort part

import re

def tryint(s):
    try:
        return int(s)
    except:
        return s

def alphanum_key(s):
    """ Turn a string into a list of string and number chunks.
        "z23a" -> ["z", 23, "a"]
    """
    return [tryint(c) for c in re.split('([0-9]+)', s)]

my_data = [{'first_name': 'Robert', 'last_name': 'Smith', 'alphanum': 'g1'},
           {'first_name': 'John', 'last_name': 'Doe', 'alphanum': 'g1'},
           {'first_name': 'Jane', 'last_name': 'Doe', 'alphanum': 'g10'},
           {'first_name': 'Jack', 'last_name': 'Sparrow', 'alphanum': 'g2'}]

# We want to sort by 'alpha' ascending, then by 'last name' ascending
# for descending, change reverse to True
sort_list = [{'field': 'alphanum', 'reverse': False},
             {'field': 'last_name', 'reverse': False}]

# because Python's sort is stable, we need to reverse the list to get the correct sorting priority
# of course, we could just create our sort_list in reverse order to begin with :-)
sort_list = sort_list[::-1]

for item in sort_list:
    my_data.sort(reverse=item['reverse'], key=lambda x: alphanum_key(x[item['field']]))

for data in my_data:
	print 'first_name: ' + data['first_name'] + '\tlast_name: ' + data['last_name'] + '\talphanum: ' + data['alphanum'] + '\n'

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