Get Items in Sorted Order from Given Dictionary - Python

We are given a dictionary where the values are strings and our task is to retrieve the items in sorted order based on the values. For example, if we have a dictionary like this: {'a': 'akshat', 'b': 'bhuvan', 'c': 'chandan'} then the output will be ['akshat', 'bhuvan', 'chandan']

Using sorted() with values()

sorted() function can be used to sort the values of a dictionary and we can retrieve the dictionary values using values().

['akshat', 'bhuvan', 'chandan']

Explanation:

• d.values() retrieves the values from the dictionary d which are ['akshat', 'bhuvan', 'chandan'].
• sorted(d.values()) sorts the values alphabetically in ascending order resulting in ['akshat', 'bhuvan', 'chandan'].

Using sorted() and lambda function

Instead of sorting the values directly we can also sort the dictionary items (key-value pairs) and extract the values in sorted order using a lambda function.

['akshat', 'bhuvan', 'chandan']

Explanation:

• items() returns the dictionary’s key-value pairs as a list of tuples.
• By using lambda we can specify that we want to sort based on the value of each tuple (the second element).

Using operator.itemgetter()

operator module provides the itemgetter() function which can be used to extract a specific item from a tuple or list. In this case we can use itemgetter(1) to sort by the second element (the value) in the dictionary’s items.

['akshat', 'bhuvan', 'chandan']

Explanation:

• operator.itemgetter(1) creates a callable that extracts the second element (value) of each tuple (key-value pair).
• We use this callable as the key argument in the sorted() function to sort by values.

Using collections.OrderedDict()

OrderedDict class from the collections module maintains the order of the item and we can use this to create a sorted dictionary and then extract the values in sorted order.

['akshat', 'bhuvan', 'chandan']

Explanation: OrderedDict(sorted(d.items(), key=lambda x: x[1])) sorts the dictionary items by value and creates an ordered dictionary with the sorted items and then we extract the values using values().