How do I sort a dictionary by value?

Question

I have two fields a string field and a numeric field in a directory. The key of the dictionary as well as the string field is unique.

how can I sort them based on values, I can do the sort based on the keys?

Answer 1

You need an ordered data type to represent the sorted values (probably a list of tuples) as it's not possible to sort a directory because they are orderless whereas list and tuples aren't. Ex.

import operator
y = {2: 3, 4: 5, 5: 4, 3: 2, 1: 1}
sorted_y = sorted(y.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))

 A list of tuples, here sorted_x will be sorted by first element in each tuple dict(sorted_y) == y

If you want to sort the keys instead of values, use

import operator
y = {2: 3, 4: 5, 5: 4, 3: 2, 1: 1}
sorted_y = sorted(y.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))

Hope this helps.

P.S. Only works in the Python versions below 3.0 

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