python dictionary sorting oddly (want non-alphabetical)

Question

so I am trying to send a packet with some keys that i have put into a dictionary. these need to be printed in a specific order, so I've tried to make a function to reorder them. I assume python is doing something to rearrange in the order I don't want, but i'm not sure why.

I'm currently using this function to try and achieve this.

def array_sort(array, sort): #yeah, it's array cuz i php like that.
    ordered = {}
    for i in range(0,len(sort)):
        if sort[i] in array:
            ordered[sort[i]] = array[sort[i]]
    keys = array.keys()
    return ordered 


order = "l5,l4,l3,l2,q,y,k,k3,d1,z,p,c,b,d3,dt,N,n,a,h,v".split(',')
keys = array_sort(infos, order)

for some reason this isn't working, infos is the list of keys in alphabetical order, i'm just not sure why the function is outputting the keys in an odd order. (a first, when 15 should be first :S)

If you know a better way to do this feel free to tell me, I just recently started on python, so I'm not that familiar.

EDIT: I was able to print the keys in the correct order using this immediately after making the order dictionary. even if it was just output as a string the order would be preserved (for the time being) and you could .split() it again to get the dictionary in the correct order (i think).

for i in range(0, len(order)):
    if order[i] in infos:
        packet += order[i] + '="' + infos[order[i]] + '" '

Answer 1

Since dictionaries in Python are unordered and all that you need is to output results ordered by the specified rule you can do something like this:

order = "l5,l4,l3,l2,q,y,k,k3,d1,z,p,c,b,d3,dt,N,n,a,h,v".split(',')

for key in order:
    print key, infos.get(key)#if infos is your dictionary

Or you can get/pass list instead of dict the following way:

print [(key, infos.get(key)) for key in order]