Useful Python functions

Recently, I have been using these functions a lot. Maybe they will be of use to others.
These functions:

• sort a list of objects by an attribute, eg sort_by_attr(people, 'name')
  
• sort a list of objects by a list of attributes eg sort_by_attrs(people, ['lastname','firstname']
  
• print out all of the attributes of an object.
  

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In the bleak bleak perl days, I might have made a list of blast hits as a dictionary of dictionaries, eg hit[gene1][gene2] = 10. Of course it's much neater to do it like this
hit = Container()
hit.gene1 = gene1
hit.gene2 = gene2
hit.score = score
Then you can sort by score, gene1, gene2 etc etc..

def sort_by_attr(seq,attr):
  """stably sort by an attribute"""
  seq2 = [[getattr(s,attr),i,s] for i,s in enumerate(seq)]
  seq2.sort()
  return [s[2] for s in seq2]

def sort_by_attr_inplace(seq,attr):
  """stably sort by an attribute in place"""
  seq[:] = sort_by_attr(seq,attr)

def sort_by_attrs(seq,attrs):
  """sort by a few attributes"""
  import copy
  seq2 = copy.copy(seq)
  attrs.reverse()
  for attr in attrs:
    seq2 = sort_by_attr(seq2,attr)

 return seq2

def sort_by_attrs_inplace(seq,attrs):
  """sort by a few attributes in place"""
  attrs.reverse()
  for attr in attrs:
    seq[:] = sort_by_attr(seq,attr)


def print_all_attrs(obj_instance):
  attrs = dir(obj_instance)
  for attr in attrs:
    if attr[:2] == '__':
       continue
    print attr, getattr(obj_instance,attr)