Sorting in pyqt tablewidget

Its sorting alpha-numerically (so, in terms of strings, ‘1’, ’10’, ’11’, ’12’, ‘2’, ’20’, ’21’, ’22’, ‘3’, ‘4’ etc. is the proper sort order. It appears that for a QTableWidgetItem, if you use the setData(Qt.EditRole, value) method, the sort order will work. Depending on your version of Qt (I assume) you may have to overload the less than method of your table widget item.

from PyQt4.QtCore import Qt, QVariant
from PyQt4.QtGui import QApplication, QTableWidget, QTableWidgetItem

class MyTableWidgetItem(QTableWidgetItem):
    def __lt__(self, other):
        if ( isinstance(other, QTableWidgetItem) ):
            my_value, my_ok = self.data(Qt.EditRole).toInt()
            other_value, other_ok = other.data(Qt.EditRole).toInt()

            if ( my_ok and other_ok ):
                return my_value < other_value

        return super(MyTableWidgetItem, self).__lt__(other)

if ( __name__ == '__main__' ):
    app = None
    if ( QApplication.instance() is None ):
        app = QApplication([])

    widget = QTableWidget()
    widget.setWindowFlags(Qt.Dialog)
    widget.setSortingEnabled(True)

    widget.setRowCount(50)
    widget.setColumnCount(3)
    for row in range(50):
       # create a normal QTableWidgetItem
       a = QTableWidgetItem()
       a.setText(str(row))
       widget.setItem(row, 0, a)

       # create a proper sorted item
       b = QTableWidgetItem()
       b.setData(Qt.EditRole, QVariant(row))
       widget.setItem(row, 1, b)

       # create a custom sorted item
       c = MyTableWidgetItem()
       c.setData(Qt.EditRole, QVariant(row))
       widget.setItem(row, 2, c)

    widget.show()
    if ( app ):
        app.exec_()