sorting by number, while keepin all data

[jarograv]

I have this code:

def closest():
	citiescomp=[]
	distances=[]
	for i in range(0,len(city_names)-1):
	    citiescomp.append([city_names[i], citiesx[i], citiesy[i]])
	while True:
		try:
			targetx=int(raw_input('Please enter the x coordinate of the city you wish to target: '))
			if targetx in range(0,1000):
				break
			else:
				print "Oops, it seems like you made a mistake. Try again by entering a number between 0 and 1000."
		except ValueError:
			print "Oops, it seems like you made a mistake. Try again by entering a number between 0 and 1000"
	while True:
		try:
			targety=int(raw_input('Please enter the y coordinate of the city you wish to target: '))
			if targety in range(0,1000):
				break
			else:
				print "Oops, it seems like you made a mistake. Try again by entering a number between 0 and 1000."
		except ValueError:
			print "Oops, it seems like you made a mistake. Try again by entering a number between 0 and 1000"
	for i in range(0, len(citiescomp)):
		distance = (sqrt( (targetx - int(citiescomp[i][1]))**2 + (targety - int(citiescomp[i][2]))**2 ))
		distance=round(distance, 2)
		distances.append(distance)
	shortest_distance=min(distances)
    closest_city=distances.index(shortest_distance)
    print "-"+citynames[closest_city+count],"at", round(shortest_distance,3),"units away"

citiescomp looks like this; citiescomp=[['city1', '111', '222'], ['city2', '333', '444'], ['city3', '555', '666'], ['city4', '777', '888']]

What happens is I find which city is the closest to the target city, but I want to sort them so that they are in order of shortest to farthest and print all distances while keeping the same name that was given to the coordinates of the city. "

Thanks,

Jaro

Editor's note:
You are mixing spaces and tabs in your indentations, a very bad habit that will make your code unusable for other people. Please use spaces only, the common standard is 4 spaces.

[Gribouillis]

Using the key argument of sorted() or list.sort(), you can sort a list of items according to a score function. The score of an item could be its price, name, age, mark, length, distance to a point, etc depending on what the items are.

from functools import partial

def dist_to_target(tx, ty, item):
    name, sx, sy = item
    return sqrt((int(sx) - tx)**2 + (int(sy) - ty)**2)

score = partial(dist_to_target, targetx, targety)
# score is now a function score(item) --> distance to target

sorted_items = sorted(citiescomp, key = score)
print sorted_items

[Ene Uran]

Oh boy, Jaro's tab indented code looks like dung on a shingle.

[Gribouillis]

Oh boy, Jaro's tab indented code looks like dung on a shingle.

An old trick to reindent your code is to use Tim Peters' reindent script http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Reindent/0.1.0 .