I have an inverted index. It consists of my word dictionary and the posting list of documents in which the terms appear. What I simply want is to sort my dictionary alphabetically. This is how it looks right now (example):
self.index =
defaultdict(<type 'list'>, {
'all': [['d03', array('I', [32L, 40L)], ['d07', array('I', [32L, 40L, 47L])], ['d05', array('I', [32L, 40L, 47L])]],
'just': [['d03', array('I', [11L])], ['d07', array('I', [11L])], ['d05', array('I', [11L])], ['d08', array('I', [11L])]])
'collect': [['d04', array('I', [24L])]]
'occurring': [['d03', array('I', [34L])], ['d07', array('I', [34L])]
...and so on this is how it should look like after sorting:
'all': [['d03', array('I', [32L, 40L)], ['d07', array('I', [32L, 40L, 47L])], ['d05', array('I', [32L, 40L, 47L])]],
'collect': [['d04', array('I', [24L])]]
'just': [['d03', array('I', [11L])], ['d07', array('I', [11L])], ['d05', array('I', [11L])], ['d08', array('I', [11L])]])
'occurring': [['d03', array('I', [34L])], ['d07', array('I', [34L])]
what i tried:
self.index = sorted(self.index)
print self.index
print self.index['all']
the first print call delivers a perfect sorted list of words but if I try to get the connected postinglist for the word 'all', I receive this error message:
TypeError: list indices must be integers, not str
Calling sorted() on a dictionary returns just a list of the keys in sorted order. Dictionaries themselves have no inherent order, you cannot sort those.
Because you re-assigned the output of sorted() back to self.index, you've now lost your reference to the original defaultdict.