How to write a counter to a file in order?

Question

I need to write a counter to a file in order of most occurring to least occurring but I am having a little trouble. When I print the counter it prints in order but when I call counter.items() and then write it to a file it writes them out of order.

I am trying to make it like this:

word      5
word2     4
word3     4
word4     3

Answer 1

I'd suggest you to use collections.Counter and then Counter.most_common will do what you're looking for:

Demo:

>>> c = Counter('abcdeabcdabcaba')
>>> c.most_common()
[('a', 5), ('b', 4), ('c', 3), ('d', 2), ('e', 1)]

Write this to a file:

c = Counter('abcdeabcdabcaba')
with open("abc", 'w') as f:
    for k,v in  c.most_common():
        f.write( "{} {}\n".format(k,v) )

help on Counter.most_common:

>>> Counter.most_common?
Docstring:
List the n most common elements and their counts from the most
common to the least.  If n is None, then list all element counts.

>>> Counter('abcdeabcdabcaba').most_common(3)
[('a', 5), ('b', 4), ('c', 3)]

Answer 2

from operator import itemgetter
print sorted( my_counter.items(),key=itemgetter(1),reverse=True)

should work fine :)

dictionaries have no order which is what a counter is so you must sort the item list if you want it in some order... in this case ordered by the "value" rather than the "key"