Sort Dictionary of Dictionaries on multiple child dictionary values

Question

I have a dictionary that looks like this:

myDict = {
    \'SER12346\': {\'serial_num\': \'SER12346\', \'site_location\': \'North America\'},
    \'ABC12345\'         


        

Answer 1

Dictionaries do not preserve order of items - hence can not be sorted. If you want an appearance of sorted dictionary, you need to make a sorted list and then insert it into OrderedDict class. Code snippet below illustrates this:

from collections import OrderedDict

myDict = {
    'SER12346': {'serial_num': 'SER12346', 'site_location': 'North America'},
    'ABC12345': {'serial_num': 'ABC12345', 'site_location': 'South America'},
    'SER12345': {'serial_num': 'SER12345', 'site_location': 'North America'},
    'SER12347': {'serial_num': 'SER12347', 'site_location': 'South America'},
    'ABC12346': {'serial_num': 'ABC12346', 'site_location': 'Europe'}
}

def sortfun(d):
    return (d[1]['site_location'], d[1]['serial_num'])

skv = sorted(myDict.iteritems(), key=sortfun)
sorted_dict = OrderedDict(skv)

print sorted_dict