Question

I have a dictionary of objects where the key is a simple string, and the value is a data object with a few attributes. I’d like to sort my dictionary based on an attribute in the values of the dictionary. i have used this to sort based on the dictionaries values

sorted = dict.values()
sorted.sort(key = operator.attrgetter('total'), reverse=True)

This yields a sorted list of values (which is expected) and I lose my original keys from the dictionary (naturally). I would like to sort both the keys and values together… how can I achieve this? Any help would be greatly appreciated?

Answer 1

Use .items() (or its iterator version iteritems) instead of .values() to get a list of (key, value) tuples.

items = sorted(dct.iteritems(), key=lambda x: x[1].total, reverse=True)