finding top k largest keys in a dictionary python

Question

Lets say I have a dictionary:

{key1:value1........... keyn:valuen}

So lets say I want to write a function

def return_top_k(         


        

Answer 1

For top-3 step by step:

>>> from operator import itemgetter
>>> dct = {"a": 1, "b": 2, "c": 3, "d": 4, "e": 5}
>>> sorted(dct.items(), key=itemgetter(1), reverse=True)
[('e', 5), ('d', 4), ('c', 3), ('b', 2), ('a', 1)]
>>> map(itemgetter(0), sorted(dct.items(), key=itemgetter(1), reverse=True))
['e', 'd', 'c', 'b', 'a']
>>> map(itemgetter(0), sorted(dct.items(), key=itemgetter(1), reverse=True))[:3]
['e', 'd', 'c']

Or using heapq module

>>> import heapq
>>> heapq.nlargest(3, dct.items(), key=itemgetter(1))
[('e', 5), ('d', 4), ('c', 3)]
>>> map(itemgetter(0), _)
['e', 'd', 'c']