In Python, what determines the order while iterating through kwargs?

Question

In python, I wrote this function to teach myself how **kwargs works in Python:

def fxn(a1, **kwargs):
    print a1
    for k in kwargs:
                 


        

Answer 1

This is a dictionary. And, as mentioned in documentation, dictionary has no order (from http://docs.python.org/tutorial/datastructures.html#dictionaries):

It is best to think of a dictionary as an unordered set of key: value pairs, with the requirement that the keys are unique (within one dictionary).

But you can make it processed in some order, like that:

• using sorted():

  def fxn(a1, **kwargs):
      print a1
      for k in sorted(kwargs): # notice "kwargs" replaced by "sorted(kwargs)"
          print k, " : ", kwargs[k]
  

• or by using OrderedDict type (you can pass OrderedDict object as parameter containing all the key-value pairs):

  from collections import OrderedDict
  
  def fxn(a1, ordkwargs):
      print a1
      for k in ordkwargs:
          print k, " : ", ordkwargs[k]
  
  fxn(3, OrderedDict((('a2',2), ('a3',3), ('a4',4))))