Sorting a 2D numpy array by multiple axes

Question

I have a 2D numpy array of shape (N,2) which is holding N points (x and y coordinates). For example:

array([[3, 2],
       [6, 2],
       [3, 6],
       [3, 4],
       [5, 3]])

I'd like to sort it such that my points are ordered by x-coordinate, and then by y in cases where the x coordinate is the same. So the array above should look like this:

array([[3, 2],
       [3, 4],
       [3, 6],
       [5, 3],
       [6, 2]])

If this was a normal Python list, I would simply define a comparator to do what I want, but as far as I can tell, numpy's sort function doesn't accept user-defined comparators. Any ideas?

---

EDIT: Thanks for the ideas! I set up a quick test case with 1000000 random integer points, and benchmarked the ones that I could run (sorry, can't upgrade numpy at the moment).

Mine:   4.078 secs 
mtrw:   7.046 secs
unutbu: 0.453 secs

Answer 1

You can use np.complex_sort. This has the side effect of changing your data to floating point, I hope that's not a problem:

>>> a = np.array([[3, 2], [6, 2], [3, 6], [3, 4], [5, 3]])
>>> atmp = np.sort_complex(a[:,0] + a[:,1]*1j)
>>> b = np.array([[np.real(x), np.imag(x)] for x in atmp])
>>> b
array([[ 3.,  2.],
       [ 3.,  4.],
       [ 3.,  6.],
       [ 5.,  3.],
       [ 6.,  2.]])