Question

I’m trying to use the sort feature when querying my mongoDB, but it is failing. The same query works in the MongoDB console but not here. Code is as follows:

import pymongo

from  pymongo import Connection
connection = Connection()
db = connection.myDB
print db.posts.count()
for post in db.posts.find({}, {'entities.user_mentions.screen_name':1}).sort({u'entities.user_mentions.screen_name':1}):
    print post

The error I get is as follows:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "find_ow.py", line 7, in <module>
    for post in db.posts.find({}, {'entities.user_mentions.screen_name':1}).sort({'entities.user_mentions.screen_name':1},1):
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pymongo-2.0.1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg/pymongo/cursor.py", line 430, in sort
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pymongo-2.0.1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg/pymongo/helpers.py", line 67, in _index_document
TypeError: first item in each key pair must be a string

I found a link elsewhere that says I need to place a ‘u’ infront of the key if using pymongo, but that didn’t work either. Anyone else get this to work or is this a bug.

Answer 1

.sort(), in pymongo, takes key and direction as parameters.

So if you want to sort by, let’s say, id then you should .sort("_id", 1)

For multiple fields:

.sort([("field1", pymongo.ASCENDING), ("field2", pymongo.DESCENDING)])