How to sort mongodb with pymongo

I'm trying to use the sort feature when querying my mongoDB, but it is failing. The same query works in the MongoDB console but not here. Code is as follows:

import pymongo

from  pymongo import Connection
connection = Connection()
db = connection.myDB
print db.posts.count()
for post in db.posts.find({}, {'entities.user_mentions.screen_name':1}).sort({u'entities.user_mentions.screen_name':1}):
    print post

The error I get is as follows:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "find_ow.py", line 7, in <module>
    for post in db.posts.find({}, {'entities.user_mentions.screen_name':1}).sort({'entities.user_mentions.screen_name':1},1):
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pymongo-2.0.1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg/pymongo/cursor.py", line 430, in sort
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pymongo-2.0.1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg/pymongo/helpers.py", line 67, in _index_document
TypeError: first item in each key pair must be a string

I found a link elsewhere that says I need to place a 'u' infront of the key if using pymongo, but that didn't work either. Anyone else get this to work or is this a bug.

Solution 1:

.sort(), in pymongo, takes key and direction as parameters.

So if you want to sort by, let's say, id then you should .sort("_id", 1)

For multiple fields:

.sort([("field1", pymongo.ASCENDING), ("field2", pymongo.DESCENDING)])

Solution 2:

You can try this:

db.Account.find().sort("UserName")  
db.Account.find().sort("UserName",pymongo.ASCENDING)   
db.Account.find().sort("UserName",pymongo.DESCENDING)

Solution 3:

This also works:

db.Account.find().sort('UserName', -1)
db.Account.find().sort('UserName', 1)

I'm using this in my code, please comment if i'm doing something wrong here, thanks.

Solution 4:

Why python uses list of tuples instead dict?

In python, you cannot guarantee that the dictionary will be interpreted in the order you declared.

So, in mongo shell you could do .sort({'field1':1,'field2':1}) and the interpreter would sort field1 at first level and field 2 at second level.

If this syntax was used in python, there is a chance of sorting by field2 at first level. With tuple, there is no such risk.

.sort([("field1",pymongo.ASCENDING), ("field2",pymongo.DESCENDING)])

Solution 5:

Sort by _id descending:

collection.find(filter={"keyword": keyword}, sort=[( "_id", -1 )])

Sort by _id ascending:

collection.find(filter={"keyword": keyword}, sort=[( "_id", 1 )])