Extract the nth key in a python dictionary?

Question

Given a python dictionary and an integer n, I need to access the nth key. I need to do this repeatedly many times in my project.

I have written a function which does this:

def ix(self,dict,n):     count=0     for i in sorted(dict.keys()):         if n==count:             return i         else:             count+=1 

But the problem is that if the dictionary is huge, the time complexity increases when used repeatedly.

Is there an efficient way to do this?

Answer 1

I guess you wanted to do something like this, but as dictionary don't have any order so the order of keys in dict.keys can be anything:

def ix(self, dct, n): #don't use dict as  a variable name    try:        return list(dct)[n] # or sorted(dct)[n] if you want the keys to be sorted    except IndexError:        print 'not enough keys' 

Answer 2

dict.keys() returns a list so, all you need to do is dict.keys()[n]

But, a dictionary is an unordered collection so nth element does not make any sense in this context.

Note: Indexing dict.keys() is not supported in python3