Sort JSON by field other than Key

Question

I have a JSON string that I want to sort. I want to sort it by the 'Name' field. I can't for the life of me find code that does this.

Unsorted:

{"RU": {"Name": "Russian", "TextDirection": "ltr"}, "FR": {"Name": "French", "TextDirection": "ltr"}, "AR": {"Name": "Arabic", "TextDirection": "rtl"}}

Sorted:

{"AR": {"Name": "Arabic", "TextDirection": "rtl"}, "FR": {"Name": "French", "TextDirection": "ltr"}, "RU": {"Name": "Russian", "TextDirection": "ltr"}}

Update:

As @jonrsharpe and @martineau pointed out. I needed to use an array or a list. I'm not too concerned about the structure. What was originally messing up the sort order was the conversion to json. By using an array instead, json did not muck with the sort order.

[{"Code": "AR", "Name": "Arabic", "TextDirection": "rtl"}, {"Code": "FR", "Name": "French", "TextDirection": "ltr"}, {"Code": "RU", "Name": "Russian", "TextDirection": "ltr"}]

JSON objects (and the Python dictionaries they are mapped to) don't have guaranteed order, so it's not clear what you mean. — jonrsharpe, Jul 12 '17 at 21:19
Because I want this sorted. I am passing this back to javascript to load a select object. — Steve3p0, Jul 12 '17 at 21:25
Again, though, *objects aren't sorted*. If order matters, put them in an array. — jonrsharpe, Jul 12 '17 at 21:26
To emphasize what @jonrsharpe already said, JSON objects (and Python dictionaries representing them) are unordered, so they can't be sorted. However JSON does have a structure which is an [ordered list of values](http://json.org/), commonly called an "array" (or a `list` in Python). — martineau, Jul 12 '17 at 21:39
Thanks @jonrsharpe and martineau for setting me straight on this. I changed the dictionary to an array and the json conversion kept the original sorting. — Steve3p0, Jul 12 '17 at 21:59

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 12 '17 at 21:28

1

You can user OrderedDict to implement a dictionary with ordered keys in Python.

However, you cannot guarantee that the JSON object will be loaded in order by other applications, because there is no ordering on dictionaries by nature (hashtables).

So, iterating on keys gives you no order guarantee, unless you use a specific class for both Python and JavaScript or if you put your dictionaries into an array whose order is static.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.html#collections.OrderedDict

How do I sort a list of dictionaries by values of the dictionary in Python?

answered Jul 12 '17 at 21:28

Fabien

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The second link has nothing to do with this problem, there are no lists involved. – cs95 Jul 12 '17 at 21:32
This is a reference for the lead given previously in the answer. – Fabien Jul 12 '17 at 23:23

Sort JSON by field other than Key

1 Answers1