Objective-C: Sort keys of NSDictionary based on dictionary entries

Question

OK so I know that dictionaries can\'t be sorted. But, say I have NSMutableArray *keys = [someDictionary allKeys]; Now, I want to sort those keys, based on the corre

Answer 1

Just write it here cause I didn't find it anywhere: To get an alphanumeric sorted NSDictionary back from an NSDictionary based on the value - which in my case was neccessary - you can do the following:

//sort typeDict alphanumeric to show it in order of values
    NSArray *keys = [typeDict allKeys];

    NSArray *sortedKeys = [keys sortedArrayUsingComparator:^NSComparisonResult(id a, id b) {
        NSString *first = [typeDict objectForKey:a];
        NSString *second = [typeDict objectForKey:b];
        return [first compare:second];
    }];
    NSLog(@"sorted Array: %@", sortedKeys);

    NSMutableDictionary *sortedTypeDict = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];
    int counter = 0;
    for(int i=0; i < [typeDict count]; i++){
        NSString *val = [typeDict objectForKey:[sortedKeys objectAtIndex:counter]];
        NSString *thekey = [sortedKeys objectAtIndex:counter];
        [sortedTypeDict setObject:val forKey:thekey];
        counter++;
    }
    NSLog(@"\n\nsorted dict: %@", sortedTypeDict);

Not a big deal!