Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook

Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great scripting language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, you can gain insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with over 100 recipes on the latest version of Python. The recipes will benefit everyone ranging from beginner to an expert. The book is broken down into 13 chapters that build from simple language concepts to more complex applications of the language. The recipes will touch upon all the necessary Python concepts related to data structures, OOP, functional programming, as well as statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively use the advantages that it offers. You will end the book equipped with the knowledge of testing, web services, and configuration and application integration tips and tricks. The recipes take a problem-solution approach to resolve issues commonly faced by Python programmers across the globe. You will be armed with the knowledge of creating applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, and command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Controlling the order of dict keys


In the Creating dictionaries – inserting and updating recipe we looked at the basics of creating a dictionary object. In many cases, we'll put items into a dictionary and fetch items from a dictionary individually. The idea of an order to the keys doesn't even enter into the problem.

There are some cases where we might want to display the contents of a dictionary. In this case, we often want to impose some order on the keys. For example, when we work with web services, the messages are often dictionaries encoded in JSON notation. In many cases we'd like to keep the keys in a particular order so that the message is easier to understand when it's displayed in a debugging log.

As another example, when we read data with the csv module each row from a spreadsheet can be represented as a dictionary. In this case, we almost always want to keep the keys in a given order so that the dictionary follows the structure of the source file.

Getting ready

A dictionary is a...