sorting a dictionary?

[Anthony Liu]

I have a dictionary which contains some words and
their frequency in a short novel.

It looks like this:

mydict = {'the':358, 'they':29, 'went':7, 'said':65}

Is there an easy to sort this dictionary and get a
list like the following (in decreasing order)?

the 358
said 65
they 29
went 7

Thanks
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[M.E.Farmer]

This comes up so often on this list that there are many examples and
recipes.
You are looking for a dictionary sort by value.
search strategy:
Python sorting dictionary

44,000+ hits on google.
First entry:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Pyt...k/Recipe/52306

hth,
M.E.Farmer

[Scott David Daniels]

Anthony Liu wrote:

mydict = {'the':358, 'they':29, 'went':7, 'said':65}
Is there an easy to sort this dictionary and get a
list like the following (in decreasing order)?

Yes.

def sortkey((word, frequency)):
return -frequency, word

for word_freq in sorted(mydict.items(), key=sortkey):
print '%-6s %s' % word_freq
--Scott David Daniels
Sc***********@Acm.Org