Accessing items in an collections.OrderedDict by index

Question

Lets say I have the following code:

import collections
d = collections.OrderedDict()
d[\'foo\'] = \'python\'
d[\'bar\'] = \'spam\'

Is there

Answer 1

Do you have to use an OrderedDict or do you specifically want a map-like type that's ordered in some way with fast positional indexing? If the latter, then consider one of Python's many sorted dict types (which orders key-value pairs based on key sort order). Some implementations also support fast indexing. For example, the sortedcontainers project has a SortedDict type for just this purpose.

>>> from sortedcontainers import SortedDict
>>> sd = SortedDict()
>>> sd['foo'] = 'python'
>>> sd['bar'] = 'spam'
>>> print sd.iloc[0] # Note that 'bar' comes before 'foo' in sort order.
'bar'
>>> # If you want the value, then simple do a key lookup:
>>> print sd[sd.iloc[1]]
'python'