Today I learned how to order the values of a dictionary according to an iterable of keys.

Order values of dictionary by iterable of keys with operator.itemgetter

Today I needed to order the values of a dictionary according to another iterable that contained keys of that same dictionary. For example, given the dictionary {"a": 1, "b": 2, "c": 3} and the iterable "cab", I want the result [3, 1, 2].

There are many different ways to do this, but I realised there is a nice way of doing it with operator.itemgetter:

from operator import itemgetter
d = {"a": 1, "b": 2, "c": 3}
it = "cab"
print(itemgetter(*it)(d))  # (3, 1, 2)

What I liked about this approach is that I often forget that operator.itemgetter accepts multiple arguments that can be used to retrieve multiple values from its operand.

The itemgetter approach is great when you need to do a specific reordering multiple times. For example, imagine you have a list of interesting government IDs and multiple sources of data:

suspects = [7342, 1610, 4210]

names = {
    7342: "John Doe",
    9999: "Mary Smith",
    1610: "Alice Johnson",
    1234: "Charles Williams",
    4210: "Barbara Smith",
    5627: "Richard Hold",
}

addresses = {
    7342: "Sunshine Boulevard",
    9999: "Rain Square",
    1610: "Hail Street",
    1234: "Sandstorm Plaza",
    4210: "Cloudy Avenue",
    5627: "Misty Drive",
}

With the itemgetter approach, you can pull all the data together easily:

from operator import itemgetter
suspect_data_retriever = itemgetter(*suspects)
print(list(
    zip(
        suspect_data_retriever(names),
        suspect_data_retriever(addresses),
    )
))
"""
[
    ('John Doe', 'Sunshine Boulevard'),
    ('Alice Johnson', 'Hail Street'),
    ('Barbara Smith', 'Cloudy Avenue')
]
"""

For the simple case of a one-off reordering / retrieval, a list comprehension or a call to map with dict.get can do the trick:

d = {"a": 1, "b": 2, "c": 3}
it = "cab"

print(list(
    map(d.get, it)
))  # [3, 1, 2]

print([d[item] for item in it])  # [3, 1, 2]

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