Value-Based Sorting: A Python Guide to Sorting Dictionaries by Values

Learn how to create a Python function that returns a dictionary sorted by values in ascending order

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Introduction

In this tutorial, we’ll explore a Python programming problem that involves writing a function to sort a dictionary by its values in ascending order. The function will accept a dictionary as input and return a new dictionary with the same key-value pairs, sorted by values.

By the end of this post, you’ll have a better understanding of how to work with dictionaries, manipulate key-value pairs, and create efficient algorithms for sorting dictionaries by values.

Step 1: Defining the Function

First, let’s define a function called sort_dict_by_values that takes a single argument, input_dict, which is the input dictionary:

def sort_dict_by_values(input_dict):
    # Sort the dictionary by values

Step 2: Extracting Key-Value Pairs

Inside the function, we’ll extract the key-value pairs from the input dictionary using the items() method. This method returns a view object that displays a list of the dictionary’s key-value pairs as tuples: