sorting a dictionary

[Andrew Bennetts]

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 10:56:20PM -0800, Yuval wrote:
> I'm looking for an efficient way to get the key of the highest value
> in a dictionary.
> For example, for dict = {"a":10, "b":5, "c":15}, I want to write a
> function get_highest(dict), that will return c as the result (since c
> is the key of the highest value in the dict.

def get_highest(d):
    return max([(x[1], x[0]) for x in d.items()])[1]

Tested:

    >>> def get_highest(d):
    ...     return max([(x[1], x[0]) for x in d.items()])[1]
    ... 
    >>> get_highest({"a":10, "b":5, "c":15})
    'c'


-Andrew.