Python Radix Sort Tutorial: Sorting Strings Made Easy

Get ready for an in-depth look at the radix sort algorithm with Rob on Algorithm Monday! In this video, Rob explains radix sort, a non-comparative algorithm, on the board in detail and then code out a solution in Python to sort strings. Follow along as Rob guides you through the step-by-step process of radix sorting a list of names using Python. Don't forget to subscribe to Rob's channel for more algorithm insights and coding tutorials!

Note: I did not set it up in this video to sort correctly when there is a word that is a substring of another string. For instance, if you have these two words: "horse" and "horsefly" ...
horsefly will come first in the sort and it shouldn't. This is because the shorter word will be put in bucket 26 until it gets to the first real letter. I did this for simplicity and saved the explanation for Project Euler 22 below. If you want to fix it here and now, just put the spaces in a bucket before the "a." That will make sure it is ahead, and solves the problem!

0:00 - Background of Radix Sort
2:47 - White-boarding the Sort
8:36 - PsuedoCode
10:55 - Code! Main Function
15:16 - Code Bucket Function
21:30 - Remove Padding and Finish

[HaleSou]

Fascinating! I had never heard of this but it was easy to follow.

[scottmiller]

The algo never compared items to items, but did compare the letters from the items with their bin labels, so not really "comparison free." Still, a good explanation.