A second way of sorting a list is to use sorted. sorted is different from .sort() in several ways:

1. It comes before a list, instead of after.
2. It generates a new list.

Let’s return to our list of names:

names = ['Xander', 'Buffy', 'Angel', 'Willow', 'Giles']

Using sorted, we can create a new list, called sorted_names:

sorted_names = sorted(names)
print(sorted_names)

This yields the list sorted alphabetically:

['Angel', 'Buffy', 'Giles', 'Willow', 'Xander']

Note that using sorted did not change names:

>>> print(names)
['Xander', 'Buffy', 'Angel', 'Willow', 'Giles']