Sorting Keys: for Loops

As mappings, as we’ve already seen, dictionaries only support accessing items by key. However, they also support type-specific operations with method calls that are useful in a variety of common use cases.

As mentioned earlier, because dictionaries are not sequences, they don’t maintain any dependable left-to-right order. This means that if we make a dictionary and print it back, its keys may come back in a different order than that in which we typed them:

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>>> D = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3}
>>> D
{'a': 1, 'c': 3, 'b': 2}

What do we do, though, if we do need to impose an ordering on a dictionary’s items? One common solution is to grab a list of keys with the dictionary keys method, sort that with the list sort method, and then step through the result with a Python for loop (be sure to press the Enter key twice after coding the for loop below—as explained in Chapter 3, an empty line means “go” at the interactive prompt, and the prompt changes to “...” on some interfaces):

>>> Ks = list(D.keys())                # Unordered keys list
>>> Ks                                 # A list in 2.6, "view" in 3.0: use list()
['a', 'c', 'b']

>>> Ks.sort()                          # Sorted keys list
>>> Ks
['a', 'b', 'c']

>>> for key in Ks:                     # Iterate though sorted keys
        print(key, '=>', D[key])       # <== press Enter twice here

a => 1
b => 2
c => 3

This is a three-step process, although, as we’ll see in later chapters, in recent versions of Python it can be done in one step with the newer sorted built-in function. The sorted call returns the result and sorts a variety of object types, in this case sorting dictionary keys automatically:

>>> D
{'a': 1, 'c': 3, 'b': 2}

>>> for key in sorted(D):
        print(key, '=>', D[key])

a => 1
b => 2
c => 3

Besides showcasing dictionaries, this use case serves to introduce the Python for loop. The for loop is a simple and efficient way to step through all the items in a sequence and run a block of code for each item in turn. A user-defined loop variable (key, here) is used to reference the current item each time through. The net effect in our example is to print the unordered dictionary’s keys and values, in sorted-key order.

The for loop, and its more general cousin the while loop, are the main ways we code repetitive tasks as statements in our scripts. Really, though, the for loop (like its relative the list comprehension, which we met earlier) is a sequence operation. It works on any object that is a sequence and, like the list comprehension, even on some things that are not. Here, for example, it is stepping across the characters in a string, printing the uppercase version of each as it goes:

>>> for c in 'spam':
        print(c.upper())

S
P
A
M

Python’s while loop is a more general sort of looping tool, not limited to stepping across sequences:

>>> x = 4
>>> while x > 0:
        print('spam!' * x)
        x -= 1

spam!spam!spam!spam!
spam!spam!spam!
spam!spam!
spam!

We’ll discuss looping statements, syntax, and tools in depth later in the book.