Custom Sorting Algorithms in Python

Today I am writing some sorting algorithms, and I guess I must always do this in javascript because I realized I did not really know how to do this in python. Anyway, it is pretty simple.

I am sorting a list of dicts, and I assigned each item a ‘weight’ attribute based on a number of other properties of the dict. Once each dict has a weight, I use the following function to sort the list.

def weight_compare(a, b):
    x = a.get('weight', 0)
    y = b.get('weight', 0)
    if x > y:
        return 1
    elif x==y:
        return 0
    else:
        return -1

a = [{'weight': 2}, {'weight': 4}, {'weight': 1}]

a.sort(weight_compare)

a
[{'weight': 1}, {'weight': 2}, {'weight': 4}]

a.sort(weight_compare, reverse=True)

a
[{'weight': 4}, {'weight': 2}, {'weight': 1}]

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