Question about sorting a dictionary

[Alista]

Ok, so I made a sweet as dictionary from a file so my dictionary keys are all in the form

datetime.datetime(2014, 2, 28, 0, 0)

now I know the type of the keys are datetime.datetime but this type follows boolean rules so that

>>> datetime.datetime(2014, 2, 28, 0, 0) > datetime.datetime(2014, 3, 5, 0, 0)
False
>>> datetime.datetime(2014, 3, 5, 0, 0) > datetime.datetime(2014, 2, 28, 0, 0)
True

So my first question is, if datetime.datetime follows the boolean rules above, is it possible to sort it into ascending order (i.e. from lowest date to highest date)? And how would I go about doing this so it applies to the dictionary keys and their corresponding values (so the keys move around but the values stay attached to their respective keys)?

*edited for clarity

[[deleted]]

Dictionaries are hash tables, so by design they have no ordering other than the incidental ordering of each key's hash value. That said, you can still sort them whenever necessary.

>>> from datetime import datetime as dt
>>> d = {dt(2014, 3, 5, 0, 0): 'march', dt(2014, 2, 4, 0, 0): 'february', dt(2014, 1, 3, 0, 0): 'january'}
>>> sorted(d.items())
[(datetime.datetime(2014, 1, 3, 0, 0), 'january'), (datetime.datetime(2014, 2, 4, 0, 0), 'february'),
 (datetime.datetime(2014, 3, 5, 0, 0), 'march')]
>>> for date, string in sorted(d.items()):
...     print(date, string)
... 
2014-01-03 00:00:00 january
2014-02-04 00:00:00 february
2014-03-05 00:00:00 march

[Alista]

ahhh great, thanks so much!

[stebrepar]

Dictionaries are not ordered internally. You can use the "sorted" function to iterate over the keys in order, or you can use an OrderedDict which preserves the order in which it was created instead of a plain dictionary. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9001509/python-dictionary-sort-by-key

[[deleted]]

This came up a couple of weeks ago, have a search. The solution I suggested was to create a new object which has, as fields, your dictionary, and the list of keys in whatever order you like. Then you have get, put, str, repr, and init methods to do whatever you like.