Order by value in dictionary

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Diez B. Roggisch wrote:

> Abandoned wrote:
> 
>> Hi..
>> I have a dictionary like these:
>> a={'a': '1000', 'b': '18000', 'c':'40', 'd': '600'} ...... 100.000
>> element
>> I want to sort this by value and i want to first 100 element..
>> Result must be:
>> [b, a, d, c .....] ( first 100 element)
>> 
>> I done this using FOR and ITERATOR but it tooks 1 second and this is
>> very big time to my project.
>> I want to learn the fastest method..
> 
> That is the fastest method, unless you write your own ordered dict
> implementation that sorts by value. But that will most probably lose the
> time when holding up the invariant when inserting key/values into the
> dictionary.

Actually, I somehow read the FOR and ITERATOR above as something like this:

entries = sorted(a.items(), key=lambda v: v[1])[:100]

The gist of my statement above is nontheless the same: if you want sorted
results, you need to sort... 

Diez