How do I sort a List of dicts by values, without labels?

Question

I'm been thiking of a method for sorting a list without labels and only numbers, like [{1:2},{3:3},{4:5},{6:10}] by it's values but I can't come up with a solution. The method should be like this.

Input:[{1:2},{3:3},{4:5},{6:10}]

Output: [{6:10},{4:5},{3:3},{1:2}]

Can someone help?

How would you sort it if the keys were strings instead of numbers (if that's what you mean by "label")? — chepner, Mar 09 '22 at 19:59

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 09 '22 at 20:10

Use a regular sort or sorted, with a key that uses whatever aggregation of the values you want to sort on (since a dict might have multiple values). For example:

>>> x = [{1:2},{3:3},{4:5},{6:10}]
>>> sorted(x, key=lambda d: -sum(d.values()))
[{6: 10}, {4: 5}, {3: 3}, {1: 2}]

Alternatives to sum might include:

next (if you're very confident that each dict has exactly one value)
statistics.mean (if they might have varying numbers of values and you want the average)
statistics.mode (if you want the most frequent value in each dict)

etc

How do I sort a List of dicts by values, without labels?

1 Answers1