Straight from the PythonInfo Wiki:

>>> import operator >>> L = [('c', 2), ('d', 1), ('a', 4), ('b', 3)] >>> map(operator.itemgetter(0), L) ['c', 'd', 'a', 'b'] >>> map(operator.itemgetter(1), L) [2, 1, 4, 3] >>> sorted(L, key=operator.itemgetter(1)) [('d', 1), ('c', 2), ('b', 3), ('a', 4)]