How do I sort a dictionary by value

Question

I have a dictionary of values read from two fields in a database: a string field and a numeric field. The string field is unique, so that is the key of the dictionary.

I can sort on the keys, but how can I sort based on the values?

Answer 1

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

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]