How Can I Efficiently Check if a Python List is Sorted?

Is There a Pythonic Method for Determining List Sorting Status?

In Python, developers often encounter the need to ascertain if a given list is sorted in either ascending or descending order. While there is no native "isSorted()" method, there is a concise and efficient Pythonic approach to achieve this.

To determine the sorting status of a list, such as a chronological list of timestamps, consider the following elegant one-liner:

<code class="python">all(l[i] <= l[i+1] for i in range(len(l) - 1))

This expression evaluates whether all elements in the list are in non-decreasing order (<=), returning True if true and False if false. For ascending order, use <=, while for descending order, use >=.

For example:

list_timestamps = [1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7]
is_sorted_ascending = all(l[i] <= l[i+1] for i in range(len(l) - 1))

In this case, is_sorted_ascending would evaluate to True as the list is sorted in ascending order.

This Pythonic approach provides a succinct and efficient way to check the sorting status of lists, particularly useful for verifying the chronological order of event sequences or other ordered data structures.

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