Question

There’s an existing function that ends in the following, where d is a dictionary:

return d.iteritems() 

that returns an unsorted iterator for a given dictionary. I would like to return an iterator that goes through the items sorted by key. How do I do that?

Answer 1

Haven’t tested this very extensively, but works in Python 2.5.2.

>>> d = {'x':2, 'h':15, 'a':2222} >>> it = iter(sorted(d.iteritems())) >>> it.next() ('a', 2222) >>> it.next() ('h', 15) >>> it.next() ('x', 2) >>> 

If you are used to doing for key, value in d.iteritems(): ... instead of iterators, this will still work with the solution above

>>> d = {'x':2, 'h':15, 'a':2222} >>> for key, value in sorted(d.iteritems()): >>>     print(key, value) ('a', 2222) ('h', 15) ('x', 2) >>> 

With Python 3.x, use d.items() instead of d.iteritems() to return an iterator.