python sort dictionary of dictionaries by value

stackoverflow.com › questions › 613183 › how-do-i-sort-a-dictionary-by-value

Python 3.7+ or CPython 3.6

Dicts preserve insertion order in Python 3.7+. Same in CPython 3.6, but it's an implementation detail.

>>> x = {1: 2, 3: 4, 4: 3, 2: 1, 0: 0}
>>> {k: v for k, v in sorted(x.items(), key=lambda item: item[1])}
{0: 0, 2: 1, 1: 2, 4: 3, 3: 4}

>>> dict(sorted(x.items(), key=lambda item: item[1]))
{0: 0, 2: 1, 1: 2, 4: 3, 3: 4}

Older Python

It is not possible to sort a dictionary, only to get a representation of a dictionary that is sorted. Dictionaries are inherently orderless, but other types, such as lists and tuples, are not. So you need an ordered data type to represent sorted values, which will be a list—probably a list of tuples.

For instance,

import operator
x = {1: 2, 3: 4, 4: 3, 2: 1, 0: 0}
sorted_x = sorted(x.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))

sorted_x will be a list of tuples sorted by the second element in each tuple. dict(sorted_x) == x.

And for those wishing to sort on keys instead of values:

import operator
x = {1: 2, 3: 4, 4: 3, 2: 1, 0: 0}
sorted_x = sorted(x.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(0))

In Python3 since unpacking is not allowed we can use

x = {1: 2, 3: 4, 4: 3, 2: 1, 0: 0}
sorted_x = sorted(x.items(), key=lambda kv: kv[1])

If you want the output as a dict, you can use collections.OrderedDict:

import collections

sorted_dict = collections.OrderedDict(sorted_x)

Answer from Devin Jeanpierre on Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.com › questions › 613183 › how-do-i-sort-a-dictionary-by-value

python - How do I sort a dictionary by value? - Stack Overflow

Python 3.7+ or CPython 3.6

Dicts preserve insertion order in Python 3.7+. Same in CPython 3.6, but it's an implementation detail.

>>> x = {1: 2, 3: 4, 4: 3, 2: 1, 0: 0}
>>> {k: v for k, v in sorted(x.items(), key=lambda item: item[1])}
{0: 0, 2: 1, 1: 2, 4: 3, 3: 4}

>>> dict(sorted(x.items(), key=lambda item: item[1]))
{0: 0, 2: 1, 1: 2, 4: 3, 3: 4}

Older Python

For instance,

import operator
x = {1: 2, 3: 4, 4: 3, 2: 1, 0: 0}
sorted_x = sorted(x.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))

sorted_x will be a list of tuples sorted by the second element in each tuple. dict(sorted_x) == x.

And for those wishing to sort on keys instead of values:

import operator
x = {1: 2, 3: 4, 4: 3, 2: 1, 0: 0}
sorted_x = sorted(x.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(0))

In Python3 since unpacking is not allowed we can use

x = {1: 2, 3: 4, 4: 3, 2: 1, 0: 0}
sorted_x = sorted(x.items(), key=lambda kv: kv[1])

If you want the output as a dict, you can use collections.OrderedDict:

import collections

sorted_dict = collections.OrderedDict(sorted_x)

2 of 16

1650

As simple as: `sorted(dict1, key=dict1.get)`

Well, it is actually possible to do a "sort by dictionary values". Recently I had to do that in a Code Golf (Stack Overflow question Code golf: Word frequency chart). Abridged, the problem was of the kind: given a text, count how often each word is encountered and display a list of the top words, sorted by decreasing frequency.

If you construct a dictionary with the words as keys and the number of occurrences of each word as value, simplified here as:

from collections import defaultdict
d = defaultdict(int)
for w in text.split():
    d[w] += 1

then you can get a list of the words, ordered by frequency of use with sorted(d, key=d.get) - the sort iterates over the dictionary keys, using the number of word occurrences as a sort key.

for w in sorted(d, key=d.get, reverse=True):
    print(w, d[w])

or, if we want a dictionary back (since Python 3.6+ preserves insertion order):

{w: d[w] for w in sorted(d, key=d.get, reverse=True)}

I am writing this detailed explanation to illustrate what people often mean by "I can easily sort a dictionary by key, but how do I sort by value" - and I think the original post was trying to address such an issue. And the solution is to do sort of list of the keys, based on the values, as shown above.

python - Sort dictionary by value, then by key

python dictionary values sorting

python - How do I sort a dictionary by value?

python - Sorting a dictionary of dictionaries

sorting - How to sort Python dictionary by value of keys

More results from stackoverflow.com

OneUptime

oneuptime.com › home › blog › how to sort a dictionary by value in python

How to Sort a Dictionary by Value in Python

January 25, 2026 - Often you only need the highest or lowest values. scores = {'Alice': 85, 'Bob': 92, 'Charlie': 78, 'Diana': 95, 'Eve': 88} # Top 3 scores top_3 = dict(sorted(scores.items(), key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)[:3]) print(top_3) # {'Diana': 95, 'Bob': 92, 'Eve': 88} # Bottom 3 scores bottom_3 = dict(sorted(scores.items(), key=lambda x: x[1])[:3]) print(bottom_3) # {'Charlie': 78, 'Alice': 85, 'Eve': 88} For large dictionaries, heapq.nlargest and heapq.nsmallest are more efficient when you only need a few items.

Discussions

Sorting a dict by its values

Hi everyone I’ve been trying to come up with the most efficient way to sort a dictionary by its values but since there aren’t any sorting methods for a dictionary, I’ve been struggling l to do so. Any ideas? Thx More on discuss.python.org

discuss.python.org

October 3, 2023

python - Sort dictionary of dictionaries by value - Stack Overflow

I saw this post, but I'm not sure ... of dictionaries. ... Would something like this work? Similar to the post you linked, this uses the key function of sorted to provide a custom sort order. iteritems() returns a (key, value) tuple, so that gets passed into lambda (x, y): y['position'], where y['position'] is the value (your nested dictionary, keyed by the status), ... More on stackoverflow.com

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Sorting dict keys and a dict inside a dict

Dictionaries are not sortable. They preserve insertion order only. If you need sorted data, use a different data structure. More on reddit.com

r/learnpython

July 4, 2022

How to sort a list containing dictionary items?

List objects have a sort function to sort the list in-place. This function has a key parameter to specify a function that will be called on each item in the list, after which the items will be sorted based on the results of that function. It also accepts a reverse parameter that, if set to True, will cause sort to sort the list in descending order. Let's say you have a list students that contains Student objects. To sort the students by age from oldest to youngest, you'd do students.sort(key = lambda x: x.Age, reverse=True). Sorting your list of dictionaries is done in pretty much the same way. See this if you need more examples. Keep in mind that in your list, the currency values are strings, not integers. You'll need to convert them first, otherwise they won't be sorted correctly. You can do that in the lambda function you pass to sort. Incidentally, using variable names like list is bad practice. You're overriding the built-in list class by doing that. More on reddit.com

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September 30, 2023

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