attrgetter takes an attribute name and returns a function that, when passed an object, returns that attribute from that object. So it's a curried getattr. The

attrgetter takes an attribute name and returns a function that, when passed an object, returns that attribute from that object. So it's a curried getattr. These are equivalent: f = attrgetter("some_property") f = lambda obj: getattr(obj, "some_property")