Dictionaries again - where do I make a mistake?

[Lad]

I use the following code to sort dictionary.


Olddict={'r':4,'c':1,'d':2,'e':3,'f':2}
Newdict={}
i = [(val, key) for (key, val) in Olddict.items()]
i.sort() # by val
i.reverse() # Get largest first.
for (val, key) in i:
print key,val
Newdict[key]=val
print Olddict
print Newdict


Sorting seems to be OK,.
the command
print key,val
prints the proper values
but I can not create Newdict to be sorted properly.

Where do I make a mistake?
Thank you for help.
L

 

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

Sorting seems to be OK,.
the command
print key,val
prints the proper values
but I can not create Newdict to be sorted properly.

Where do I make a mistake?
Thank you for help.

Dictionaries are unordered -- the order in which items come out is
unspecified. It's based on the details of their internal storage mechanism (a
hash table), and you can't control it at all.

If you need your pairs in a certain order, you'll have to use a list of tuples.

Dustin

 

[Tim Chase]

but I can not create Newdict to be sorted properly.

Where do I make a mistake?

By assuming that dictionaries *can* be sorted.

For more reading:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Python/Cookbook/Recipe/52306
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/107747

They're intrinsically an unsorted datatype.

-tkc