How To Order By Key (alphabetically) In Defaultdict(list) For An Inverted Index

I have an inverted index. It consists of my word dictionary and the posting list of documents in which the terms appear. What I simply want is to sort my dictionary alphabetically.

Solution 1:

Calling sorted() on a dictionary returns just a list of the keys in sorted order. Dictionaries themselves have no inherent order, you cannot sort those.

Because you re-assigned the output of sorted() back to self.index, you've now lost your reference to the original defaultdict.

Solution 2:

I do not believe dictionaries can be sorted in the sense you are referring to. If you want to view the dictionary sorted you can try the following:

sorted(self.index.items())

Note however that the result is not a dictionary - its just a list of (key, value) tuples which would be associated with each other in the original dictionary.

Solution 3:

I read this yesterday and i think it might be just what you are looking for. Its a Binary Heap implementation for Python dictionaries. It puts out its items in sorted order if you call a for on it.

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/117228-priority-dictionary/