Feature suggestion: allow sort_values to take a callable

[dsaxton]

I occasionally find myself wanting to sort not by the values of a Series but instead by some function of those values, so it could be quite handy to have a way of passing a callable to sort_values (perhaps just a by argument as in DataFrame.sort_values) with the idea being to sort by the return values. The same would likely be useful for DataFrame.sort_values.

A simple situation where you might want to do this would be if you want to sort by the magnitudes of the values in a Series without losing information about the sign. Another might be if the values themselves were collections, and you'd like to sort by their size, or by specific values within those collections.

Has interest in a feature like this been expressed before?

[TomAugspurger]

#3942 I believe.