Sort a list of tuples by 2nd item (integer value) [duplicate]

I have a list of tuples that looks something like this:

[('abc', 121),('abc', 231),('abc', 148), ('abc',221)]

I want to sort this list in ascending order by the integer value inside the tuples. Is it possible?

Try using the key keyword with sorted().

sorted([('abc', 121),('abc', 231),('abc', 148), ('abc',221)], 
       key=lambda x: x[1])

key should be a function that identifies how to retrieve the comparable element from your data structure. In your case, it is the second element of the tuple, so we access [1].

For optimization, see jamylak’s response using itemgetter(1), which is essentially a faster version of lambda x: x[1].