How do you sort a dictionary in Python?

Just use operator.itemgetter(1). If you don't want to add an extra import line, lambda is the answer.

True, I look it up every time too lol

sorted(d.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(1)) is the cleanest. It's also marginally faster than lambda, and just from the name you can immediately tell what it's pulling out, which is nice.

Isn't that just something you memorize? It's one line—I don't see why you'd bother hunting for a cleaner version. The searching habit itself isn't bad, but this is at a level where it's not even worth searching for.

I use value-based sorting really often in practice, and just memorizing sorted(d.items(), key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True) covers most cases. A lot of people use -x[1] for descending order, but if the values are strings, you can't prepend a minus sign, so it immediately throws an error. reverse=True is safer.

These days, I just use Counter or pandas. Once the data volume gets large, even running sorted once feels like a burden. That said, it probably depends on the case.

This is right lol. But since dicts preserve insertion order as of Python 3.7, think again about whether you really need sorting. If it's just for output, you can often just output them in insertion order.

Any source? I benchmarked before that itemgetter is faster than lambda, but in my environment the difference was almost noise level. I get using it for readability, but mentioning performance seems a bit much.