Inverting a dictionary when some of the original values are identical

Question

Say I have a dictionary called word_counter_dictionary that counts how many words are in the document in the form {\'word\' : number}. For example,

Answer 1

For getting the largest elements of some dataset an inverted dictionary might not be the best data structure.

Either put the items in a sorted list (example assumes you want to get to two most frequent words):

word_counter_dictionary = {'first':1, 'second':2, 'third':3, 'fourth':2}
counter_word_list = sorted((count, word) for word, count in word_counter_dictionary.items())

Result:

>>> print(counter_word_list[-2:])
[(2, 'second'), (3, 'third')]

Or use Python's included batteries (heapq.nlargest in this case):

import heapq, operator
print(heapq.nlargest(2, word_counter_dictionary.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(1)))

Result:

[('third', 3), ('second', 2)]