David Harrison wrote:
Hi all,
Quick pep265 summary : People frequently want to count the occurrences of values in a dict, or sort the results of a d.items() call by value. This could be done by extending the current items() definition, or by creating a new function for the dict object (both requiring a C implementation).
In Python 2.4: ->>> ud = dict(a=1, b=2, c=3) ->>> from operator import itemgetter ->>> print sorted(ud.items(), key=itemgetter(1), reverse=True) [('c', 3), ('b', 2), ('a', 1)] I'm not entirely sure who needs to be thanked for this addition, but it sure makes the 'decorate-sort-undecorate' idiom very, very easy to follow (which was, in fact, the point - I do remember that much of the discussion). I think the addition of 'sorted', and the keyword arguments for both it and list.sort make PEP 265 somewhat redundant. Cheers, Nick.