Newbie question on dictionary!!!

[Tom B.]

"Balaji" <balaji at email.arizona.edu> wrote in message
news:494182a9.0408261150.a4c767f at posting.google.com...
> Hello everybody...
>
> I want to ask a simple question.
>
> Suppose I have an list say g=['a','b','c','d']
>
> and I have an dictionary say k={'b':20,'a':10}
>
> Now I want to sort this dictionary on the basis of the list and if it
> doesnt find any of the element in the list then I wud like to replace
> it with zero..
>
> so I would like to modify k into {'a':10,'b':20,'c':0,'d':0}
>
> I have tried all the built in associated with dict and lists but was
> not able to come up with an solution...
>
> Can anyone help...

Dictionaries are not sortable but you can easily access the values in an
sorted order,

list = ['a','b','d']
dict = {'a':123,'c':456,'b':789}
newdict = {}
l = dict.keys() + list
l.sort()
for i in l:
    if dict.has_key(i):
        newdict[i] = dict[i]
    else:
        newdict[i] = 0
dict = newdict

That should do it,

Tom

     print dict[i]

Tom