Working on the Open Event Server project an issue about arranging language-translation listing in alphabetical order came up. To solve this issue of language listing arrangement i.e. #2817, I found the ‘d0_dictsort’ function in jinja2 to sort dictionaries. It is a defined in jinja2.filters. Python dicts are unsorted and in our web application we at times may want to order them by either their key or value. So this function comes handy.

This is what the function looks like:

do_dictsort(value, case_sensitive=False, by='key')

We can write them in three ways as:

{% for record in my_dictionary|dictsort %}
    case insensitive and sort the dict by key

{% for record in my_dictionary|dicsort(true) %}
    case sensitive and sort the dict by key

{% for record in my_dictionary|dictsort(false, 'value') %}
    sort the dict by value, normally sorted and case insensitive

1.       The first way is easily understood that dict has been sorted by key not taking case into consideration. It is just in the same way written as dictsort(false).
2.       Second way is basically the first being case sensitive. dictsort(true) here tells us that case is sensitive.
3.      Third way is dictsort(false,’value’). The first parameter defines that case insensitive while second parameter defines that it is sorted by ‘value’.

The issues was to sort translation selector for the page in alphabetical order. The languages were stored in a dictionary which to change in order, I found this function very easy and useful.

Basically what we had was:

This is how the function was used in the code for the sort. Like this:

<ul class="dropdown-menu lang-list">
   {% for code in all-languages|dictsort(false,'value') %}
       <li><a  href="#" style="#969191" class="translate" id="{{ code[0] }}">{{  all_languages[code[0]] }}<>a><li>
    {% endfor %}
<ul>

Here: {{ all_languages }} is the list which contained the languages like French, English, etc., which could be accessed with its global language code. code here(index for all_languages) is a tuple of {‘global_language_code’,’language’} (An example would be (‘fr’,’French’), so code[0] gave me the language_code.

Finally, the result:

This is one of the simple ways to sort your dictionaries.