Print a dict sorted by values

Question

I'm basically trying to iterate through a dict and print out the key / values from largest value to lowest. I have been searching this site and a lot of people are using lambda but I'm not really sure how its working so I'm trying to avoid it for now.

dictIterator = iter(sorted(bigramDict.iteritems())) for ngram, value in dictIterator:     print("There are " + str(value) + " " + ngram) 

Looking over the code above I assumed it would make an iterator which returns the key/value pairs in order from largest to smallest but it's not.

Can anyone see what the problem is? or another method of doing this?

Answer 1

One can take advantage of the fact that sort works on tuples by considering the first element as more important than the second etc:

d = { "a":4, "c":3, "b":12 } d_view = [ (v,k) for k,v in d.iteritems() ] d_view.sort(reverse=True) # natively sort tuples by first element for v,k in d_view:     print "%s: %d" % (k,v) 

Output:

b: 12 a: 4 c: 3 

EDIT: one-liner, generator expression:

sorted( ((v,k) for k,v in d.iteritems()), reverse=True) 

Output:

[(12, 'b'), (4, 'a'), (3, 'c')]