Return first N key:value pairs from dict

Question

Consider the following dictionary, d:

d = {\'a\': 3, \'b\': 2, \'c\': 3, \'d\': 4, \'e\': 5}

I want to return the first N key:value pairs f

Answer 1

Python's dicts are not ordered, so it's meaningless to ask for the "first N" keys.

The collections.OrderedDict class is available if that's what you need. You could efficiently get its first four elements as

import itertools
import collections

d = collections.OrderedDict((('foo', 'bar'), (1, 'a'), (2, 'b'), (3, 'c'), (4, 'd')))
x = itertools.islice(d.items(), 0, 4)

for key, value in x:
    print key, value

itertools.islice allows you to lazily take a slice of elements from any iterator. If you want the result to be reusable you'd need to convert it to a list or something, like so:

x = list(itertools.islice(d.items(), 0, 4))