HOW TO SORT DICTIONARY IN PYTHON

A Python dictionary is a data structure, which stores values as key-value pair. A dictionary has got very much importance in programming. Sorting a dictionary is one of those problems we encounter in many programming cases.

This can be done by using the built-in function sorted().

• Sorting by keys:

The sorted() function will take any iterable and returns the sorted list. To sort the dictionary by keys, pass key values to the sorted().

d = {1:'red', 4:'green', 2:'blue', 8:'black', 6:'yellow'}
#sort the keys
print(sorted(d.keys()))

print(sorted(d.items()))

Output:

[1, 2, 4, 6, 8]
[(1, 'red'), (2, 'blue'), (4, 'green'), (6, 'yellow'), (8, 'black')]

• Sorting by values:

Just like how we sorted dictionary using keys, we can sort by values.

d = {1:'red', 4:'green', 2:'blue', 8:'black', 6:'yellow'}

print(sorted(d.values()))

Output:

['black', 'blue', 'green', 'red', 'yellow']

• Sorting the Keys and Values in alphabetical using the value

Od = {1:'red', 4:'green', 2:'blue', 8:'black', 6:'yellow'}

print("Sorted by key: ",sorted(d.items(), key=lambda x:x[0]))

print("Sorted by value: ",sorted(d.items(), key=lambda x:x[1]))

Output:

Sorted by key:  [(1, 'red'), (2, 'blue'), (4, 'green'), (6, 'yellow'), (8, 'black')]
Sorted by value:  [(8, 'black'), (2, 'blue'), (4, 'green'), (1, 'red'), (6, 'yellow')]

• Reverse:

The default sorting order is ascending. In case we want the descending order, we can use reverse=True.

d = {1:'red', 4:'green', 2:'blue', 8:'black', 6:'yellow'}

print(sorted(d.keys(), reverse=True))

Output:

[8, 6, 4, 2, 1]