How to sort a list of strings?

Question

What is the best way of creating an alphabetically sorted list in Python?

Answer 1

But how does this handle language specific sorting rules? Does it take locale into account?

No, list.sort() is a generic sorting function. If you want to sort according to the Unicode rules, you'll have to define a custom sort key function. You can try using the pyuca module, but I don't know how complete it is.

Answer 2

It is also worth noting the sorted() function:

for x in sorted(list):
    print x

This returns a new, sorted version of a list without changing the original list.