How to implement associative array (not dictionary) in Python?

Question

I trying to print out a dictionary in Python:

Dictionary = {"Forename":"Paul","Surname":"Dinh"}
for Key,Value in Dictionary.iteritems():
  print Key,"=",Value

Although the item "Forename" is listed first, but dictionaries in Python seem to be sorted by values, so the result is like this:

Surname = Dinh
Forename = Paul

How to print out these with the same order in code or the order when items are appended in (not sorted by values nor by keys)?

Answer 1

This may meet your need better:

Dictionary = {"Forename":"Paul","Surname":"Dinh"}
KeyList = ["Forename", "Surname"]
for Key in KeyList:
    print Key,"=",Dictionary[Key]

Answer 2

You can use a list of tuples (or list of lists). Like this:

Arr= [("Forename","Paul"),("Surname","Dinh")]
for Key,Value in Arr: 
    print Key,"=",Value

Forename = Paul
Surname = Dinh

you can make a dictionary out of this with:

Dictionary=dict(Arr)

And the correctly sorted keys like this:

keys = [k for k,v in Arr]

Then do this:

for k in keys: print k,Dictionary[k]

but I agree with the comments on your question: Would it not be easy to sort the keys in the required order when looping instead?

EDIT: (thank you Rik Poggi), OrderedDict does this for you:

od=collections.OrderedDict(Arr)
for k in od: print k,od[k]

Answer 3

First of all dictionaries are not sorted at all nor by key, nor by value.

And basing on your description. You actualy need collections.OrderedDict module

from collections import OrderedDict

my_dict = OrderedDict([("Forename", "Paul"), ("Surname", "Dinh")])

for key, value in my_dict.iteritems():
    print '%s = %s' % (key, value)

Note that you need to instantiate OrderedDict from list of tuples not from another dict as dict instance will shuffle the order of items before OrderedDict will be instantiated.