How do you retrieve items from a dictionary in the order that they're inserted?

Is it possible to retrieve items from a Python dictionary in the order that they were inserted?

The standard Python dict does this by default if you're using CPython 3.6+ (or Python 3.7+ for any other implementation of Python).

On older versions of Python you can use collections.OrderedDict.

Use OrderedDict(), available since version 2.7

Just a matter of curiosity:

from collections import OrderedDict
a = {}
b = OrderedDict()
c = OrderedDict()

a['key1'] = 'value1'
a['key2'] = 'value2'

b['key1'] = 'value1'
b['key2'] = 'value2'

c['key2'] = 'value2'
c['key1'] = 'value1'

print a == b  # True
print a == c  # True
print b == c  # False

The other answers are correct; it's not possible, but you could write this yourself. However, in case you're unsure how to actually implement something like this, here's a complete and working implementation that subclasses dict which I've just written and tested. (Note that the order of values passed to the constructor is undefined but will come before values passed later, and you could always just not allow ordered dicts to be initialized with values.)

class ordered_dict(dict):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        dict.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)
        self._order = self.keys()

    def __setitem__(self, key, value):
        dict.__setitem__(self, key, value)
        if key in self._order:
            self._order.remove(key)
        self._order.append(key)

    def __delitem__(self, key):
        dict.__delitem__(self, key)
        self._order.remove(key)

    def order(self):
        return self._order[:]

    def ordered_items(self):
        return [(key,self[key]) for key in self._order]


od = ordered_dict()
od["hello"] = "world"
od["goodbye"] = "cruel world"
print od.order()            # prints ['hello', 'goodbye']

del od["hello"]
od["monty"] = "python"
print od.order()            # prints ['goodbye', 'monty']

od["hello"] = "kitty"
print od.order()            # prints ['goodbye', 'monty', 'hello']

print od.ordered_items()
# prints [('goodbye','cruel world'), ('monty','python'), ('hello','kitty')]

As of Python 3.7, the standard dict preserves insertion order. From the docs:

Changed in version 3.7: Dictionary order is guaranteed to be insertion order. This behavior was implementation detail of CPython from 3.6.

So, you should be able to iterate over the dictionary normally or use popitem().

You can't do this with the base dict class -- it's ordered by hash. You could build your own dictionary that is really a list of key,value pairs or somesuch, which would be ordered.

How do you retrieve items from a dictionary in the order that they're inserted?

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