Is it possible to sort a dictionary?

[Rikard Bosnjakovic]

Victor Louie wrote:

> I was just wondering if anyone knows how to sort a dictionary by
> value...since the dictionary is <key: value> and where my value is a list.

You can't sort the actual dictionary since they're mapping. You can,
however, put the values in a list and sort the list. Something like
this:

    for key in thedict.keys():
        sortedlist.append( (key, thedict[key]) )
    sortedlist.sort()


Test-run:

>>> foo = {"foo":[1,2,3], "bar":[2,3,4], "gazonk":[3,4,5]}
>>> foo
{'foo': [1, 2, 3], 'gazonk': [3, 4, 5], 'bar': [2, 3, 4]}
>>> sorted = []
>>> for key in foo.keys():
...   sorted.append( (foo[key], key) )
... 
>>> sorted.sort()
>>> sorted
[([1, 2, 3], 'foo'), ([2, 3, 4], 'bar'), ([3, 4, 5], 'gazonk')]



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