How to convert tuple to dictionary while maintaining same order

Question

I have a dictionary and I have sorted that dictionary by values. Following is code with sample data:

mydict = {'b':4, 'a':1, 'd':8, 'c':10}

Now, I want to sort this by value in descending order and hence, I used the following code:

sorted_dict = sorted(mydict.iteritems(), key = operator.itemgetter(1), reverse = True)

When I print sorted_dict, I get a list of tuples:

sorted_dict
[('c', 10), ('d', 8), ('b', 4), ('a', 1)]

However, I want this in the form of dictionary. So I used the following code:

dict(sorted_dict)

and got the following result:

{'a': 1, 'c': 10, 'b': 4, 'd': 8}

So, it looks like dict() method is automatically sorting dictionary by key. However, my desired output is:

{'c':10, 'd':8, 'b':4, 'a':1}

How do I obtain this output?

Can someone please help?

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 01 '14 at 02:04

You can’t with a regular dict, which is not an ordered collection to begin with. collections.OrderedDict, however, is!

>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> d = OrderedDict([('c', 10), ('d', 8), ('b', 4), ('a', 1)])
>>> d
OrderedDict([('c', 10), ('d', 8), ('b', 4), ('a', 1)])

Granted, the output doesn’t look very meaningful, but it is correct. You can access items by key and iterate through pairs in order.

How to convert tuple to dictionary while maintaining same order

1 Answers1