How to sort dictionaries by keys in Python

Question

Can anyone tell me how I can sort this:

{\'a\': [1, 2, 3], \'c\': [\'one\', \'two\'], \'b\': [\'blah\', \'bhasdf\', \'asdf\'], \'d\': [\'asdf\', \'wer\', \'a         


        

Answer 1

Dicts don't have an order.

You can call sorted but this just gives you a sorted list of the keys:

>>> sorted(d)
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']

You can treat it as an iterable and sort the key-value tuples, but then you've just got a list of tuples. That's not the same as a dict.

>>> sorted(d.items())
[
 ('a', [1, 2, 3]),
 ('b', ['blah', 'bhasdf', 'asdf']),
 ('c', ['one', 'two']),
 ('d', ['asdf', 'wer', 'asdf', 'zxcv'])
]

If you are using Python 2.7 or newer you could also consider using an OrderedDict.

dict subclass that remembers the order entries were added

For example:

>>> d = collections.OrderedDict(sorted(d.items()))
>>> for k, v in d.items():
>>>     print k, v

a [1, 2, 3]
b ['blah', 'bhasdf', 'asdf']
c ['one', 'two']
d ['asdf', 'wer', 'asdf', 'zxcv']