Sort Python Dictionaries by Key or Value

#python #beginners

In Python a dictionary is a key-value mapping. Its a set of key-value pairs, every key has a value.

You can use this to receive values using keys. Values in a dictionary can be of any data type. The data in a dictionary is not in any specific order.

This means you can define a dict with key-value pairs like this:

>>> di = { 'five': 5, 'two': 2, 'one': 1 }
>>> di
{'five': 5, 'two': 2, 'one': 1}
>>>

You can call the list method with the dictionary as parameter. This outputs all the keys:

>>> list(di)
['five', 'two', 'one']

Sort dictionary by values

Each pair in a dictionary is a key-value pair. For the dictionary above 'five','two' and 'one' are keys. The values are 1,2,5 and each are mapped.

To sort a dictionary by values you can use:

>>> sorted(di.values())
[1, 2, 5]

You can sort by keys too:

>>> sorted(di)
['five', 'one', 'two']

This is in alphabetic order, 'f' before 'o' and 't'.

You can define a dictionary with months like this:

>>> month = { 'January':1, 'February':2, 'March':3, 'April':4, 'May':5, 'June':6 }

Then you can sort by keys or values:

>>> sorted(month)
['April', 'February', 'January', 'June', 'March', 'May']
>>> sorted(month.values())
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

You can sort in reverse order too:

>>> sorted(month, reverse=True)
['May', 'March', 'June', 'January', 'February', 'April']

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