I have a dictionary of values read from two fields in a database: a string field and a numeric field. The string field is unique, so that is the key of the dictionary.
I can sort on the keys, but how can I sort based on the values?
Note: I have read Stack Overflow question here How do I sort a list of dictionaries by a value of the dictionary? and probably could change my code to have a list of dictionaries, but since I do not really need a list of dictionaries I wanted to know if there is a simpler solution to sort either in ascending or descending order.
It is not possible to sort a dictionary, only to get a representation of a dictionary that is sorted. Dictionaries are inherently orderless, but other types, such as lists and tuples, are not. So you need an ordered data type to represent sorted values, which will be a list—probably a list of tuples.
Well, it is actually possible to do a "sort by dictionary values". Recently I had to do that in a Code Golf (Stack Overflow question Code golf: Word frequency chart). Abridged, the problem was of the kind: given a text, count how often each word is encountered and display a list of the top words, sorted by decreasing frequency.
If you construct a dictionary with the words as keys and the number of occurrences of each word as value, simplified here as:
from collections import defaultdict
d = defaultdict(int)
for w in text.split():
d[w] += 1
then you can get a list of the words, ordered by frequency of use with sorted(d, key=d.get) - the sort iterates over the dictionary keys, using the number of word occurrences as a sort key .
for w in sorted(d, key=d.get, reverse=True):
print(w, d[w])
I am writing this detailed explanation to illustrate what people often mean by "I can easily sort a dictionary by key, but how do I sort by value" - and I think the original post was trying to address such an issue. And the solution is to do sort of list of the keys, based on the values, as shown above.
Nas Banov
You could use:
sorted(d.items(), key=lambda x: x[1])
This will sort the dictionary by the values of each entry within the dictionary from smallest to largest.
To sort it in descending order just add reverse=True:
Whilst I found the accepted answer useful, I was also surprised that it hasn't been updated to reference OrderedDict from the standard library collections module as a viable, modern alternative - designed to solve exactly this type of problem.
sorted([(value,key) for (key,value) in mydict.items()])
Or optimized slightly as suggested by John Fouhy:
sorted((value,key) for (key,value) in mydict.items())
user26294
It can often be very handy to use namedtuple. For example, you have a dictionary of 'name' as keys and 'score' as values and you want to sort on 'score':
import collections
Player = collections.namedtuple('Player', 'score name')
d = {'John':5, 'Alex':10, 'Richard': 7}
sorting with lowest score first:
worst = sorted(Player(v,k) for (k,v) in d.items())
sorting with highest score first:
best = sorted([Player(v,k) for (k,v) in d.items()], reverse=True)
Now you can get the name and score of, let's say the second-best player (index=1) very Pythonically like this:
player = best[1]
player.name
'Richard'
player.score
7
Remi
As of Python 3.6 the built-in dict will be ordered
Good news, so the OP's original use case of mapping pairs retrieved from a database with unique string ids as keys and numeric values as values into a built-in Python v3.6+ dict, should now respect the insert order.
If say the resulting two column table expressions from a database query like:
SELECT a_key, a_value FROM a_table ORDER BY a_value;
would be stored in two Python tuples, k_seq and v_seq (aligned by numerical index and with the same length of course), then:
Hopefully this will lead to a thin layer OrderedDict implementation as a first step. As @JimFasarakis-Hilliard indicated, some see use cases for the OrderedDict type also in the future. I think the Python community at large will carefully inspect, if this will stand the test of time, and what the next steps will be.
Time to rethink our coding habits to not miss the possibilities opened by stable ordering of:
Keyword arguments and
(intermediate) dict storage
The first because it eases dispatch in the implementation of functions and methods in some cases.
The second as it encourages to more easily use dicts as intermediate storage in processing pipelines.
Raymond Hettinger kindly provided documentation explaining "The Tech Behind Python 3.6 Dictionaries" - from his San Francisco Python Meetup Group presentation 2016-DEC-08.
And maybe quite some Stack Overflow high decorated question and answer pages will receive variants of this information and many high quality answers will require a per version update too.
Caveat Emptor (but also see below update 2017-12-15):
As @ajcr rightfully notes: "The order-preserving aspect of this new implementation is considered an implementation detail and should not be relied upon." (from the whatsnew36) not nit picking, but the citation was cut a bit pessimistic ;-). It continues as " (this may change in the future, but it is desired to have this new dict implementation in the language for a few releases before changing the language spec to mandate order-preserving semantics for all current and future Python implementations; this also helps preserve backwards-compatibility with older versions of the language where random iteration order is still in effect, e.g. Python 3.5)."
So as in some human languages (e.g. German), usage shapes the language, and the will now has been declared ... in whatsnew36.
Make it so. "Dict keeps insertion order" is the ruling. Thanks!
So, the version 3.6 CPython side-effect of dict insertion ordering is now becoming part of the language spec (and not anymore only an implementation detail). That mail thread also surfaced some distinguishing design goals for collections.OrderedDict as reminded by Raymond Hettinger during discussion.
Dilettant
I had the same problem, and I solved it like this:
WantedOutput = sorted(MyDict, key=lambda x : MyDict[x])
(People who answer "It is not possible to sort a dict" did not read the question! In fact, "I can sort on the keys, but how can I sort based on the values?" clearly means that he wants a list of the keys sorted according to the value of their values.)
Please notice that the order is not well defined (keys with the same value will be in an arbitrary order in the output list).
If you use keys(), values() or items() then you'll iterate in sorted order by value.
It's implemented using the skip list datastructure.
malthe
from django.utils.datastructures import SortedDict
def sortedDictByKey(self,data):
"""Sorted dictionary order by key"""
sortedDict = SortedDict()
if data:
if isinstance(data, dict):
sortedKey = sorted(data.keys())
for k in sortedKey:
sortedDict[k] = data[k]
return sortedDict
Argun
Of course, remember, you need to use OrderedDict because regular Python dictionaries don't keep the original order.
from collections import OrderedDict
a = OrderedDict(sorted(originalDict.items(), key=lambda x: x[1]))
If you do not have Python 2.7 or higher, the best you can do is iterate over the values in a generator function. (There is an OrderedDict for 2.4 and 2.6 here, but
a) I don't know about how well it works
and
b) You have to download and install it of course. If you do not have administrative access, then I'm afraid the option's out.)
def gen(originalDict):
for x, y in sorted(zip(originalDict.keys(), originalDict.values()), key=lambda z: z[1]):
yield (x, y)
#Yields as a tuple with (key, value). You can iterate with conditional clauses to get what you want.
for bleh, meh in gen(myDict):
if bleh == "foo":
print(myDict[bleh])
You can also print out every value
for bleh, meh in gen(myDict):
print(bleh, meh)
Please remember to remove the parentheses after print if not using Python 3.0 or above
ytpillai
As pointed out by Dilettant, Python 3.6 will now keep the order! I thought I'd share a function I wrote that eases the sorting of an iterable (tuple, list, dict). In the latter case, you can sort either on keys or values, and it can take numeric comparison into account. Only for >= 3.6!
When you try using sorted on an iterable that holds e.g. strings as well as ints, sorted() will fail. Of course you can force string comparison with str(). However, in some cases you want to do actual numeric comparison where 12 is smaller than 20 (which is not the case in string comparison). So I came up with the following. When you want explicit numeric comparison you can use the flag num_as_num which will try to do explicit numeric sorting by trying to convert all values to floats. If that succeeds, it will do numeric sorting, otherwise it'll resort to string comparison.
Comments for improvement welcome.
def sort_iterable(iterable, sort_on=None, reverse=False, num_as_num=False):
def _sort(i):
# sort by 0 = keys, 1 values, None for lists and tuples
try:
if num_as_num:
if i is None:
_sorted = sorted(iterable, key=lambda v: float(v), reverse=reverse)
else:
_sorted = dict(sorted(iterable.items(), key=lambda v: float(v[i]), reverse=reverse))
else:
raise TypeError
except (TypeError, ValueError):
if i is None:
_sorted = sorted(iterable, key=lambda v: str(v), reverse=reverse)
else:
_sorted = dict(sorted(iterable.items(), key=lambda v: str(v[i]), reverse=reverse))
return _sorted
if isinstance(iterable, list):
sorted_list = _sort(None)
return sorted_list
elif isinstance(iterable, tuple):
sorted_list = tuple(_sort(None))
return sorted_list
elif isinstance(iterable, dict):
if sort_on == 'keys':
sorted_dict = _sort(0)
return sorted_dict
elif sort_on == 'values':
sorted_dict = _sort(1)
return sorted_dict
elif sort_on is not None:
raise ValueError(f"Unexpected value {sort_on} for sort_on. When sorting a dict, use key or values")
else:
raise TypeError(f"Unexpected type {type(iterable)} for iterable. Expected a list, tuple, or dict")
Bram Vanroy
Here is a solution using zip on d.values() and d.keys(). A few lines down this link (on Dictionary view objects) is:
This allows the creation of (value, key) pairs using zip(): pairs = zip(d.values(), d.keys()).
You may use a temporary list to help you to sort the dictionary:
#Assume dictionary to be:
d = {'apple': 500.1, 'banana': 1500.2, 'orange': 1.0, 'pineapple': 789.0}
# create a temporary list
tmp = []
# iterate through the dictionary and append each tuple into the temporary list
for key, value in d.items():
tmptuple = (value, key)
tmp.append(tmptuple)
# sort the list in ascending order
tmp = sorted(tmp)
print (tmp)
If you want to sort the list in descending order, simply change the original sorting line to:
tmp = sorted(tmp, reverse=True)
Using list comprehension, the one liner would be:
#Assuming the dictionary looks like
d = {'apple': 500.1, 'banana': 1500.2, 'orange': 1.0, 'pineapple': 789.0}
#One liner for sorting in ascending order
print (sorted([(v, k) for k, v in d.items()]))
#One liner for sorting in descending order
print (sorted([(v, k) for k, v in d.items()], reverse=True))
Sample Output:
#Asending order
[(1.0, 'orange'), (500.1, 'apple'), (789.0, 'pineapple'), (1500.2, 'banana')]
#Descending order
[(1500.2, 'banana'), (789.0, 'pineapple'), (500.1, 'apple'), (1.0, 'orange')]
mcgag
Iterate through a dict and sort it by its values in descending order:
$ python --version
Python 3.2.2
$ cat sort_dict_by_val_desc.py
dictionary = dict(siis = 1, sana = 2, joka = 3, tuli = 4, aina = 5)
for word in sorted(dictionary, key=dictionary.get, reverse=True):
print(word, dictionary[word])
$ python sort_dict_by_val_desc.py
aina 5
tuli 4
joka 3
sana 2
siis 1
juhoh
If your values are integers, and you use Python 2.7 or newer, you can use collections.Counter instead of dict. The most_common method will give you all items, sorted by the value.
months = {"January": 31, "February": 28, "March": 31, "April": 30, "May": 31,
"June": 30, "July": 31, "August": 31, "September": 30, "October": 31,
"November": 30, "December": 31}
def mykey(t):
""" Customize your sorting logic using this function. The parameter to
this function is a tuple. Comment/uncomment the return statements to test
different logics.
"""
return t[1] # sort by number of days in the month
#return t[1], t[0] # sort by number of days, then by month name
#return len(t[0]) # sort by length of month name
#return t[0][-1] # sort by last character of month name
# Since a dictionary can't be sorted by value, what you can do is to convert
# it into a list of tuples with tuple length 2.
# You can then do custom sorts by passing your own function to sorted().
months_as_list = sorted(months.items(), key=mykey, reverse=False)
for month in months_as_list:
print month
lessthanl0l
Retrieved from : http:www.stackoverflow.com/questions/613183/how-do-i-sort-a-dictionary-by-value