Sort a list of objects by an attribute given a string of the name of the attribute

Question

So far:

def sort_by(column):
    for order in sorted(orders, key=lambda order: order.column):
        ...

list('ratio')

Clearly both ratio and 'ratio' are illegal arguments here. I think Django and most other python web frameworks do something like this internally. Is there a pattern for this?

Answer 1

def arrange_list(column):
    for order in sorted(orders, key=lambda order: order.__dict__[column]):
        ...

should do the trick.

Answer 2

sorted(..., key=operator.attrgetter(column))