CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonsorting
PrimuS
PrimuS

Reputation: 2683

Order list by occurance and alphabetical if tied

I am totally new to python and I already struggle with a fairly small task.

I have a wordlist, in which I want to count the (duplicate) words, show the top "n" words and in case of a tie, order them alphabetically.

For the first two parts I wrote this: 

def count_words(s, n):

    # TODO: Count the number of occurences of each word in s
    wordlist = s.split()

    #Count words
    counts = Counter(wordlist)

    #Get top n words
    top_n = counts.most_common(n)

    return top_n

but for print count_words("cat bat mat cat cat mat mat mat bat bat cat", 3) it gives me [('mat', 4), ('cat', 4), ('bat', 3)], but I need it to be [('cat', 4), ('mat', 4), ('bat', 3)]

Any hints appreciated!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 67

Answers (1)

phogl
phogl

Reputation: 504

Try

top_n.sort(key=lambda x: (-x[1], x[0]))

right before the return. It sorts by the first element of the key, then, if there's a tie, by the second. Since it sorts from smallest to biggest, the first value is multiplied by -1.

Upvotes: 2

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