top values from dictionary

Question

How do I retrive the top 3 list from a dictionary?

>>> d {'a': 2, 'and': 23, 'this': 14, 'only.': 21, 'is': 2, 'work': 2, 'will': 2, 'as': 2, 'test': 4} 

Expected result:

and: 23 only: 21 this: 14 

Answer 1

Use collections.Counter:

>>> d = Counter({'a': 2, 'and': 23, 'this': 14, 'only.': 21, 'is': 2, 'work': 2, 'will': 2, 'as': 2, 'test': 4}) >>> d.most_common() [('and', 23), ('only.', 21), ('this', 14), ('test', 4), ('a', 2), ('is', 2), ('work', 2), ('will', 2), ('as', 2)] >>> for k, v in d.most_common(3): ...     print '%s: %i' % (k, v) ...  and: 23 only.: 21 this: 14 

Counter objects offer various other advantages, such as making it almost trivial to collect the counts in the first place.

Answer 2

>>> d = {'a': 2, 'and': 23, 'this': 14, 'only.': 21, 'is': 2, 'work': 2, 'will': 2, 'as': 2, 'test': 4} >>> t = sorted(d.iteritems(), key=lambda x:-x[1])[:3]  >>> for x in t: ...     print "{0}: {1}".format(*x) ...  and: 23 only.: 21 this: 14