How to know the position of items in a Python ordered dictionary

Question

Can we know the position of items in Python's ordered dictionary?

For example:

If I have dictionary:

// Ordered_dict is OrderedDictionary  Ordered_dict = {"fruit": "banana", "drinks": "water", "animal": "cat"} 

Now how do I know in which position cat belongs to? Is it possible to get an answer like:

position (Ordered_dict["animal"]) = 2 ? or in some other way?

Answer 1

You may get a list of keys with the keys property:

In [20]: d=OrderedDict((("fruit", "banana"), ("drinks", 'water'), ("animal", "cat")))  In [21]: d.keys().index('animal') Out[21]: 2 

Better performance could be achieved with the use of iterkeys() though.

For those using Python 3:

>>> list(d.keys()).index('animal') 2 

Answer 2

For Python3: tuple(d).index('animal')

This is almost the same as Marein's answer above, but uses an immutable tuple instead of a mutable list. So it should run a little bit faster (~12% faster in my quick sanity check).