How can I sort a dictionary by key?

Question

What would be a nice way to go from {2:3, 1:89, 4:5, 3:0} to {1:89, 2:3, 3:0, 4:5}?

I checked some posts but they all use the "sorted" operator that returns tuples.

Answer 1

First thing first the Standard Python dictionaries are unordered. So, even if you sorted the (key, value) pairs, you wouldn't be able to store them in a dict in a way that would preserve the ordering.

So,  the easiest way of sorting a dictionary by key is to use OrderedDict, which remembers the order in which the elements have been inserted:

The following example illustrates how we will use the ordered dictionary:-

import collections

d = {2:3, 1:89, 4:5, 3:0} 

od = collections.OrderedDict(sorted(d.items())) 

od 

To know more about this you can have a look at the following video tutorial:-