Sorting Python Dictionary By Values

First, I would like to say happy new year to you and hope you had a great 2017 and looking forward to a more rewarding and better year ahead. My 2017 started not very well, but ended on a high. I changed jobs. I will write about it later.

For now I just wanted to document something I hope will be useful to others as much as it has been for me.

There are times when something quite seemingly quite simple can be nothing but. In MySQL, it's simple to group by a field but didn't think I could do the same thing in Python. A quick search led to this example that I quickly adapted to fit my need. Hence this post... not only to share but to also document it just in case the original link disappears like some sites do these days.

from operator import itemgetter
from itertools import groupby

rows = [
    {'address': '5412 N CLARK', 'date': '07/01/2012'},
    {'address': '5148 N CLARK', 'date': '07/04/2012'},
    {'address': '5800 E 58TH', 'date': '07/02/2012'},
    {'address': '2122 N CLARK', 'date': '07/03/2012'},
    {'address': '5645 N RAVENSWOOD', 'date': '07/02/2012'},
    {'address': '1060 W ADDISON', 'date': '07/02/2012'},
    {'address': '4801 N BROADWAY', 'date': '07/01/2012'},
    {'address': '1039 W GRANVILLE', 'date': '07/04/2012'},
]
# Sort by the desired field first
rows.sort(key=itemgetter('date'))

# Iterate in groups
for date, items in groupby(rows, key=itemgetter('date')):
    print(date)
    for i in items:
        print('    ', i)

Then: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9198334/how-to-build-up-a-html-table-with-a-simple-for-loop-in-jinja2