Question

I need to sort and search through a dictionary. I know that dictionary cannot be sorted. But all I need to do search through it in a sorted format. The dictionary itself is not needed to be sorted.

There are 2 values. A string, which is a key and associated with the key is an integer value. I need to get a sorted representation based on the integer. I can get that with OrderedDict.

But instead of the whole dictionary I need to print just the top 50 values. And I need to extract some of the keys using RegEx. Say all the keys starting with ‘a’ and of 5 length.

On a side note can someone tell me how to print in a good format in python? Like:

{'secondly': 2, 
'pardon': 6, 
'saves': 1, 
'knelt': 1}

insdead of a single line. Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

If you want to sort the dictionary based on the integer value you can do the following.

d = {'secondly': 2, 'pardon': 6, 'saves': 1, 'knelt': 1}
a = sorted(d.iteritems(), key=lambda x:x[1], reverse=True)

The a will contain a list of tuples:

[('pardon', 6), ('secondly', 2), ('saves', 1), ('knelt', 1)]

Which you can limit to a top 50 by using a[:50] and then search through the keys, with youre search pattern.