Quicksort with Python

Question

I am totally new to python and I am trying to implement quicksort in it. Could someone please help me complete my code?

I do not know how to concatenate the three arrays and printing them.

def sort(array=[12,4,5,6,7,3,1,15]):
    less = []
    equal = []
    greater = []

    if len(array) > 1:
        pivot = array[0]
        for x in array:
            if x < pivot:
                less.append(x)
            if x == pivot:
                equal.append(x)
            if x > pivot:
                greater.append(x)
            sort(less)
            sort(pivot)
            sort(greater)

Answer 1

def sort(array=[12,4,5,6,7,3,1,15]):
    less = []
    equal = []
    greater = []

    if len(array) > 1:
        pivot = array[0]
        for x in array:
            if x < pivot:
                less.append(x)
            if x == pivot:
                equal.append(x)
            if x > pivot:
                greater.append(x)
        # Don't forget to return something!
        return sort(less)+equal+sort(greater)  # Just use the + operator to join lists
    # Note that you want equal ^^^^^ not pivot
    else:  # You need to hande the part at the end of the recursion - when you only have one element in your array, just return the array.
        return array

Answer 2

inlace sort

def qsort(a, b=0, e=None):
    # partitioning
    def part(a, start, end):
        p = start
        for i in xrange(start+1, end):
            if a[i] < a[p]:
                a[i], a[p+1] = a[p+1], a[i]
                a[p+1], a[p] = a[p], a[p+1]
                p += 1
        return p

    if e is None:
        e = len(a)
    if e-b <= 1: return

    p = part(a, b, e)
    qsort(a, b, p)
    qsort(a, p+1, e)

without recursion:

deq = collections.deque()
deq.append((b, e))
while len(deq):
    el = deq.pop()
    if el[1] - el[0] > 1:
        p = part(a, el[0], el[1])
        deq.append((el[0], p))
        deq.append((p+1, el[1]))

Answer 3

def quick_sort(array):
    return quick_sort([x for x in array[1:] if x < array[0]]) + [array[0]] \
        + quick_sort([x for x in array[1:] if x >= array[0]]) if array else []

Answer 4

There are many answers to this already, but I think this approach is the most clean implementation:

def quicksort(arr):
    """ Quicksort a list

    :type arr: list
    :param arr: List to sort
    :returns: list -- Sorted list
    """
    if not arr:
        return []

    pivots = [x for x in arr if x == arr[0]]
    lesser = quicksort([x for x in arr if x < arr[0]])
    greater = quicksort([x for x in arr if x > arr[0]])

    return lesser + pivots + greater

You can of course skip storing everything in variables and return them straight away like this:

def quicksort(arr):
    """ Quicksort a list

    :type arr: list
    :param arr: List to sort
    :returns: list -- Sorted list
    """
    if not arr:
        return []

    return quicksort([x for x in arr if x < arr[0]]) \
        + [x for x in arr if x == arr[0]] \
        + quicksort([x for x in arr if x > arr[0]])

Answer 5

def Partition(A,p,q):
    i=p
    x=A[i]
    for j in range(p+1,q+1):
        if A[j]<=x:
            i=i+1
            tmp=A[j]
            A[j]=A[i]
            A[i]=tmp
    l=A[p]
    A[p]=A[i]
    A[i]=l
    return i

def quickSort(A,p,q):
    if p<q:
        r=Partition(A,p,q)
        quickSort(A,p,r-1)
        quickSort(A,r+1,q)
    return A

Answer 6

Or if you prefer a one-liner that also illustrates the Python equivalent of C/C++ varags, lambda expressions, and if expressions:

qsort = lambda x=None, *xs: [] if x is None else qsort(*[a for a in xs if a<x]) + [x] + qsort(*[a for a in xs if a>=x])