Readably print out a python dict() sorted by key

Question

I would like to print a python dictionary to a file using PrettyPrinter (for human readability) but have the dictionary be sorted by key in the output file to further improv

Answer 1

An easy way to print the sorted contents of the dictionary, in Python 3:

>>> dict_example = {'c': 1, 'b': 2, 'a': 3}
>>> for key, value in sorted(dict_example.items()):
...   print("{} : {}".format(key, value))
... 
a : 3
b : 2
c : 1

The expression dict_example.items() returns tuples, which can then be sorted by sorted():

>>> dict_example.items()
dict_items([('c', 1), ('b', 2), ('a', 3)])
>>> sorted(dict_example.items())
[('a', 3), ('b', 2), ('c', 1)]

Below is an example to pretty print the sorted contents of a Python dictionary's values.

for key, value in sorted(dict_example.items(), key=lambda d_values: d_values[1]): 
    print("{} : {}".format(key, value))