I use PyYaml to output a YAML file. But it reorder my items. like following
>>> yaml.dump({'3':5, '1':3})
"{'1': 3, '3': 5}\n"
I want to get "{'3': 5, '1': 3}\n". Can I do that thing
PS. I have tried the collections.OrderedDict. It's output is not good. Like following
>>> a= collections.OrderedDict()
>>> a['3']=1
>>> a['1']=2
>>> a['5']=2
>>> yaml.dump(a)
"!!python/object/apply:collections.OrderedDict\n- - ['3', 1]\n - ['1', 2]\n - ['5', 2]\n"
TL;DR: The solution is in the two lines commented "LOOK HERE!" It is possible to deal with YAML as dicts within your program and with an ordering in the stored file/text if you accept that the output will be lists of lists.
If you don't mind horribly ugly explicit types like !!python/ordered_dict or !!omap littering your file then you can go that route as well. My vote goes to !!omap, but I'm unsure how many tools/libs support it (I'm pretty sure fewer tools support !!python/ordered_dict, though). Ultimately you are dealing with two independent sets of data: the dict itself, and a metadata that defines the ordering of the keys.
(There are semi-magical ways of coercing an ordered dict in YAML without the !!python/ordered_dict or !!omap mess everywhere, but they are fragile, contradict the very definition of dictionaries, and will likely break as the underlying YAML library evolves. This situation is identical for JSON, by the way, as YAML is a superset of JSON and neither guarantee the order of keys -- which means the workarounds break the first time a standard-compliant tool/user messes with the file.)
The rest of this post is example/verification code and an explanation of why things are this way.
from __future__ import print_function
import yaml
# Setting up some example data
d = {'name': 'A Project',
'version': {'major': 1, 'minor': 4, 'patch': 2},
'add-ons': ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']}
# LOOK HERE!
ordering = ['name', 'version', 'add-ons', 'papayas']
ordered_set = [[x, d[x]] for x in ordering if x in d.keys()]
# In the event you only care about a few keys,
# you can tack the unspecified ones onto the end
# Note that 'papayas' isn't a key. You can establish an ordering that
# includes optional keys by using 'if' as a guard in the list comprehension.
# Demonstration
things = {'unordered.yaml': d, 'ordered.yaml': ordered_set}
for k in things:
f = open(k, 'w')
f.write(yaml.dump(things[k], default_flow_style=False, allow_unicode=True))
f.close()
# Let's check the result
output = []
for k in things:
f = open(k, 'r')
output.append(dict(yaml.load(f.read())))
f.close()
# Should print 'OK'
if output[0] == output[1]:
print('OK')
else:
print('Something is wrong')
The files created look like this:
ordered.yaml:
- - name
- A Project
- - version
- major: 1
minor: 4
patch: 2
- - add-ons
- - foo
- bar
- baz
unordered.yaml:
add-ons:
- foo
- bar
- baz
name: A Project
version:
major: 1
minor: 4
patch: 2
This doesn't produce as pretty a YAML document as you might hope. That said, it can take pretty YAML as initial input (yay!), and scripting the conversion from un-pretty, ordered YAML to pretty, still-ordered, dict-style YAML is straightforward (which I leave as an exercise for you).
If you have an ordering of keys you want preserved, write that into an ordered list/tuple. Use that list to generate an ordered list of lists (not list of tuples, though, because you'll get the !!python/tuple type in YAML, and that sucks). Dump that to YAML. To read it back in read it as normal, then pass that structure to dict() and you're back to the original dictionary you started with. You may have to recursively descend the structure if you have a nested structure which requires its order preserved (this is easier to do in code than to explain in prose -- which is something you probably already know).
In this example I want to have a project 'name' come first in the file, then 'version' number elements, then 'add-ons'. Normally PyYAML orders dictionary keys in alphanumeric order when you call dump(), but this isn't reliable because that might change in the future and there is nothing in the YAML standard that requires this, so I have no guarantee that a different YAML utility will do things this way. 'add-ons' comes before 'name', so I have an ordering problem. So I define my order, then pack an ordered list of lists, and then dump that.
You are asking for order out of something that is inherently unordered. A dictionary is a hash table, internally ordered exclusively for search speed. That order is something you're not supposed to be able to mess with because if a faster way of implementing dictionaries is discovered tomorrow the runtime needs to implement it without breaking everyone's code that depended on dictionaries being a helpful abstraction of a hash table.
In the same way, YAML is not a markup language (after all, it originally stood for "Yaml Ain't a Markup Language"), it is a data format. The difference is important. Some data is ordered, like tuples and lists; some isn't, like bags of key-value pairs (slightly different from a hash table, but conceptually similar).
I use a recursive version of this sort of solution to guarantee YAML output across different YAML implementations, not for human readability, but because I do a lot of data passing in YAML and each record has to be signed with a key, and indefinite order prevents uniform signatures whenever dicts/hashes are in use.
YAML mappings are unordered and so are Python dicts. The official way to read in a file
and keep the ordering is to use !!omap but those get converted to tuples in PyYAML and are not as easy to update as dict/ordereddict/OrderedDict.
If you already have a yaml file that you read in and update you can use my ruamel.yaml library that reads in the mappings when used in round-trip mode as ordereddict and writes them out as normal mappings (it also preservers comments).
An example of usage was given as an answer to another question.
I might be a little late to the party but using the function add_representer of the yaml package seems to resolve the problem.I just added the yaml.add_representer(collections.OrderedDict, Representer.represent_dict) before my yaml.dump and my yaml does not have anymore the above format warning :
import collections
import yaml
l= collections.OrderedDict()
l['hax']=45
l['ko']=[4,5]
l['ax']="less"
yaml.dump(l)
#output:'!!python/object/apply:collections.OrderedDict\n- - - hax\n - 45\n - - ko\n - - 4\n - 5\n - - ax\n - less\n'
#adding a representer for Ordered Dictionaries
from yaml.representer import Representer
yaml.add_representer(collections.OrderedDict, Representer.represent_dict)
yaml.dump(l)
#output'ax: less\nhax: 45\nko:\n- 4\n- 5\n'
Please let me know if it helps.
Another solution might be also to use oyaml instead of pyyaml as it suggested in this post.
Related
I have a dictionary whose keys are tuples like (int, str, int, str, int), and the corresponding values are lists of floats of the same size.
I pickled the dictionary twice by the same script:
import pickle
with open(name, 'wb') as source:
pickle.dump(the_dict, source)
For the two resulting binary files test_1 and test_2, I run
diff test_1 test_2
in a terminal (I'm using macOS) to see whether I can use diff to tell the difference. However, I received
Binary files test_1 and test_2 differ
Why? Was the same dictionary being pickled in different ways? Does it mean I cannot use diff to tell whether two dictionaries are identical?
Depending on what version of Python you are using, Python versions before v3.6 do not remember the order of insertion. Python v3.6 made this an implementation detail and v3.7 made it a language feature.
For backwards compatibility, you shouldn't depend on the dictionary remembering the order of inserted keys. Instead, you can use OrderedDict from the Collections module.
Also, using diff on pickled dict data may show differences in the data even though the actual dictionaries are equivalent -- since dicts, unlike lists, generally make no assurances on order state (see above for when that is not the case).
I have a dictionary that I declared in a particular order and want to keep it in that order all the time. The keys/values can't really be kept in order based on their value, I just want it in the order that I declared it.
So if I have the dictionary:
d = {'ac': 33, 'gw': 20, 'ap': 102, 'za': 321, 'bs': 10}
It isn't in that order if I view it or iterate through it. Is there any way to make sure Python will keep the explicit order that I declared the keys/values in?
From Python 3.6 onwards, the standard dict type maintains insertion order by default.
Defining
d = {'ac':33, 'gw':20, 'ap':102, 'za':321, 'bs':10}
will result in a dictionary with the keys in the order listed in the source code.
This was achieved by using a simple array with integers for the sparse hash table, where those integers index into another array that stores the key-value pairs (plus the calculated hash). That latter array just happens to store the items in insertion order, and the whole combination actually uses less memory than the implementation used in Python 3.5 and before. See the original idea post by Raymond Hettinger for details.
In 3.6 this was still considered an implementation detail; see the What's New in Python 3.6 documentation:
The order-preserving aspect of this new implementation is considered an implementation detail and should not be relied upon (this may change in the future, but it is desired to have this new dict implementation in the language for a few releases before changing the language spec to mandate order-preserving semantics for all current and future Python implementations; this also helps preserve backwards-compatibility with older versions of the language where random iteration order is still in effect, e.g. Python 3.5).
Python 3.7 elevates this implementation detail to a language specification, so it is now mandatory that dict preserves order in all Python implementations compatible with that version or newer. See the pronouncement by the BDFL. As of Python 3.8, dictionaries also support iteration in reverse.
You may still want to use the collections.OrderedDict() class in certain cases, as it offers some additional functionality on top of the standard dict type. Such as as being reversible (this extends to the view objects), and supporting reordering (via the move_to_end() method).
from collections import OrderedDict
OrderedDict((word, True) for word in words)
contains
OrderedDict([('He', True), ('will', True), ('be', True), ('the', True), ('winner', True)])
If the values are True (or any other immutable object), you can also use:
OrderedDict.fromkeys(words, True)
Rather than explaining the theoretical part, I'll give a simple example.
>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> my_dictionary=OrderedDict()
>>> my_dictionary['foo']=3
>>> my_dictionary['aol']=1
>>> my_dictionary
OrderedDict([('foo', 3), ('aol', 1)])
>>> dict(my_dictionary)
{'foo': 3, 'aol': 1}
Note that this answer applies to python versions prior to python3.7. CPython 3.6 maintains insertion order under most circumstances as an implementation detail. Starting from Python3.7 onward, it has been declared that implementations MUST maintain insertion order to be compliant.
python dictionaries are unordered. If you want an ordered dictionary, try collections.OrderedDict.
Note that OrderedDict was introduced into the standard library in python 2.7. If you have an older version of python, you can find recipes for ordered dictionaries on ActiveState.
Dictionaries will use an order that makes searching efficient, and you cant change that,
You could just use a list of objects (a 2 element tuple in a simple case, or even a class), and append items to the end. You can then use linear search to find items in it.
Alternatively you could create or use a different data structure created with the intention of maintaining order.
I came across this post while trying to figure out how to get OrderedDict to work. PyDev for Eclipse couldn't find OrderedDict at all, so I ended up deciding to make a tuple of my dictionary's key values as I would like them to be ordered. When I needed to output my list, I just iterated through the tuple's values and plugged the iterated 'key' from the tuple into the dictionary to retrieve my values in the order I needed them.
example:
test_dict = dict( val1 = "hi", val2 = "bye", val3 = "huh?", val4 = "what....")
test_tuple = ( 'val1', 'val2', 'val3', 'val4')
for key in test_tuple: print(test_dict[key])
It's a tad cumbersome, but I'm pressed for time and it's the workaround I came up with.
note: the list of lists approach that somebody else suggested does not really make sense to me, because lists are ordered and indexed (and are also a different structure than dictionaries).
You can't really do what you want with a dictionary. You already have the dictionary d = {'ac':33, 'gw':20, 'ap':102, 'za':321, 'bs':10}created. I found there was no way to keep in order once it is already created. What I did was make a json file instead with the object:
{"ac":33,"gw":20,"ap":102,"za":321,"bs":10}
I used:
r = json.load(open('file.json'), object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)
then used:
print json.dumps(r)
to verify.
from collections import OrderedDict
list1 = ['k1', 'k2']
list2 = ['v1', 'v2']
new_ordered_dict = OrderedDict(zip(list1, list2))
print new_ordered_dict
# OrderedDict([('k1', 'v1'), ('k2', 'v2')])
Another alternative is to use Pandas dataframe as it guarantees the order and the index locations of the items in a dict-like structure.
I had a similar problem when developing a Django project. I couldn't use OrderedDict, because I was running an old version of python, so the solution was to use Django's SortedDict class:
https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/SortedDict
e.g.,
from django.utils.datastructures import SortedDict
d2 = SortedDict()
d2['b'] = 1
d2['a'] = 2
d2['c'] = 3
Note: This answer is originally from 2011. If you have access to Python version 2.7 or higher, then you should have access to the now standard collections.OrderedDict, of which many examples have been provided by others in this thread.
Generally, you can design a class that behaves like a dictionary, mainly be implementing the methods __contains__, __getitem__, __delitem__, __setitem__ and some more. That class can have any behaviour you like, for example prividing a sorted iterator over the keys ...
if you would like to have a dictionary in a specific order, you can also create a list of lists, where the first item will be the key, and the second item will be the value
and will look like this
example
>>> list =[[1,2],[2,3]]
>>> for i in list:
... print i[0]
... print i[1]
1
2
2
3
You can do the same thing which i did for dictionary.
Create a list and empty dictionary:
dictionary_items = {}
fields = [['Name', 'Himanshu Kanojiya'], ['email id', 'hima#gmail.com']]
l = fields[0][0]
m = fields[0][1]
n = fields[1][0]
q = fields[1][1]
dictionary_items[l] = m
dictionary_items[n] = q
print dictionary_items
I have a dictionary that I declared in a particular order and want to keep it in that order all the time. The keys/values can't really be kept in order based on their value, I just want it in the order that I declared it.
So if I have the dictionary:
d = {'ac': 33, 'gw': 20, 'ap': 102, 'za': 321, 'bs': 10}
It isn't in that order if I view it or iterate through it. Is there any way to make sure Python will keep the explicit order that I declared the keys/values in?
From Python 3.6 onwards, the standard dict type maintains insertion order by default.
Defining
d = {'ac':33, 'gw':20, 'ap':102, 'za':321, 'bs':10}
will result in a dictionary with the keys in the order listed in the source code.
This was achieved by using a simple array with integers for the sparse hash table, where those integers index into another array that stores the key-value pairs (plus the calculated hash). That latter array just happens to store the items in insertion order, and the whole combination actually uses less memory than the implementation used in Python 3.5 and before. See the original idea post by Raymond Hettinger for details.
In 3.6 this was still considered an implementation detail; see the What's New in Python 3.6 documentation:
The order-preserving aspect of this new implementation is considered an implementation detail and should not be relied upon (this may change in the future, but it is desired to have this new dict implementation in the language for a few releases before changing the language spec to mandate order-preserving semantics for all current and future Python implementations; this also helps preserve backwards-compatibility with older versions of the language where random iteration order is still in effect, e.g. Python 3.5).
Python 3.7 elevates this implementation detail to a language specification, so it is now mandatory that dict preserves order in all Python implementations compatible with that version or newer. See the pronouncement by the BDFL. As of Python 3.8, dictionaries also support iteration in reverse.
You may still want to use the collections.OrderedDict() class in certain cases, as it offers some additional functionality on top of the standard dict type. Such as as being reversible (this extends to the view objects), and supporting reordering (via the move_to_end() method).
from collections import OrderedDict
OrderedDict((word, True) for word in words)
contains
OrderedDict([('He', True), ('will', True), ('be', True), ('the', True), ('winner', True)])
If the values are True (or any other immutable object), you can also use:
OrderedDict.fromkeys(words, True)
Rather than explaining the theoretical part, I'll give a simple example.
>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> my_dictionary=OrderedDict()
>>> my_dictionary['foo']=3
>>> my_dictionary['aol']=1
>>> my_dictionary
OrderedDict([('foo', 3), ('aol', 1)])
>>> dict(my_dictionary)
{'foo': 3, 'aol': 1}
Note that this answer applies to python versions prior to python3.7. CPython 3.6 maintains insertion order under most circumstances as an implementation detail. Starting from Python3.7 onward, it has been declared that implementations MUST maintain insertion order to be compliant.
python dictionaries are unordered. If you want an ordered dictionary, try collections.OrderedDict.
Note that OrderedDict was introduced into the standard library in python 2.7. If you have an older version of python, you can find recipes for ordered dictionaries on ActiveState.
Dictionaries will use an order that makes searching efficient, and you cant change that,
You could just use a list of objects (a 2 element tuple in a simple case, or even a class), and append items to the end. You can then use linear search to find items in it.
Alternatively you could create or use a different data structure created with the intention of maintaining order.
I came across this post while trying to figure out how to get OrderedDict to work. PyDev for Eclipse couldn't find OrderedDict at all, so I ended up deciding to make a tuple of my dictionary's key values as I would like them to be ordered. When I needed to output my list, I just iterated through the tuple's values and plugged the iterated 'key' from the tuple into the dictionary to retrieve my values in the order I needed them.
example:
test_dict = dict( val1 = "hi", val2 = "bye", val3 = "huh?", val4 = "what....")
test_tuple = ( 'val1', 'val2', 'val3', 'val4')
for key in test_tuple: print(test_dict[key])
It's a tad cumbersome, but I'm pressed for time and it's the workaround I came up with.
note: the list of lists approach that somebody else suggested does not really make sense to me, because lists are ordered and indexed (and are also a different structure than dictionaries).
You can't really do what you want with a dictionary. You already have the dictionary d = {'ac':33, 'gw':20, 'ap':102, 'za':321, 'bs':10}created. I found there was no way to keep in order once it is already created. What I did was make a json file instead with the object:
{"ac":33,"gw":20,"ap":102,"za":321,"bs":10}
I used:
r = json.load(open('file.json'), object_pairs_hook=OrderedDict)
then used:
print json.dumps(r)
to verify.
from collections import OrderedDict
list1 = ['k1', 'k2']
list2 = ['v1', 'v2']
new_ordered_dict = OrderedDict(zip(list1, list2))
print new_ordered_dict
# OrderedDict([('k1', 'v1'), ('k2', 'v2')])
Another alternative is to use Pandas dataframe as it guarantees the order and the index locations of the items in a dict-like structure.
I had a similar problem when developing a Django project. I couldn't use OrderedDict, because I was running an old version of python, so the solution was to use Django's SortedDict class:
https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/SortedDict
e.g.,
from django.utils.datastructures import SortedDict
d2 = SortedDict()
d2['b'] = 1
d2['a'] = 2
d2['c'] = 3
Note: This answer is originally from 2011. If you have access to Python version 2.7 or higher, then you should have access to the now standard collections.OrderedDict, of which many examples have been provided by others in this thread.
Generally, you can design a class that behaves like a dictionary, mainly be implementing the methods __contains__, __getitem__, __delitem__, __setitem__ and some more. That class can have any behaviour you like, for example prividing a sorted iterator over the keys ...
if you would like to have a dictionary in a specific order, you can also create a list of lists, where the first item will be the key, and the second item will be the value
and will look like this
example
>>> list =[[1,2],[2,3]]
>>> for i in list:
... print i[0]
... print i[1]
1
2
2
3
You can do the same thing which i did for dictionary.
Create a list and empty dictionary:
dictionary_items = {}
fields = [['Name', 'Himanshu Kanojiya'], ['email id', 'hima#gmail.com']]
l = fields[0][0]
m = fields[0][1]
n = fields[1][0]
q = fields[1][1]
dictionary_items[l] = m
dictionary_items[n] = q
print dictionary_items
I've just started using yaml and I love it. However, the other day I came across a case that seemed really odd and I am not sure what is causing it. I have a list of file path locations and another list of file path destinations. I create a dictionary out of them and then use yaml to dump it out to read later (I work with artists and use yaml so that it is human readable as well).
sorry for the long lists:
source = ['/data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/model/v026_03/blackhawk_diff.exr', '/data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/model/v026_03/blackhawk_maskTapeFloor.1051.exr', '/data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/model/v026_03/blackhawk_maskBurnt.1031.exr']
dest = ['/data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/texture/v0006/blackhawk_diff_diffuse_v0006.exr', '/data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/texture/v0006/blackhawk_maskTapeFloor_diffuse_v0006.1051.exr', '/data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/texture/v0006/blackhawk_maskBurnt_diffuse_v0006.1031.exr']
dictionary = dict(zip(source, dest))
print yaml.dump(dictionary)
this is the output that I get:
{/data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/model/v026_03/blackhawk_diff.exr: /data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/texture/v0006/blackhaw
k_diff_diffuse_v0006.exr,
/data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/model/v026_03/blackhawk_maskBurnt.1031.exr: /data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/texture/v00
06/blackhawk_maskBurnt_diffuse_v0006.1031.exr,
? /data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/model/v026_03/blackhawk_maskTapeFloor.1051.exr
: /data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/texture/v0006/blackhawk_maskTapeFloor_diffuse_v0006.1051.exr}
It comes back in fine with a yaml.load, but this is not useful for artists to be able to edit if need be.
This is the first question in the FAQ.
By default, PyYAML chooses the style of a collection depending on whether it has nested collections. If a collection has nested collections, it will be assigned the block style. Otherwise it will have the flow style.
If you want collections to be always serialized in the block style, set the parameter default_flow_style of dump() to False.
So:
>>> print yaml.dump(dictionary, default_flow_style=False)
/data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/model/v026_03/blackhawk_diff.exr: /data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/texture/v0006/blackhawk_diff_diffuse_v0006.exr
/data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/model/v026_03/blackhawk_maskBurnt.1031.exr: /data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/texture/v0006/blackhawk_maskBurnt_diffuse_v0006.1031.exr
? /data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/model/v026_03/blackhawk_maskTapeFloor.1051.exr
: /data/job/maze/build/vehicle/blackhawk/blackhawkHelicopter/work/data/map/tasks/texture/v0006/blackhawk_maskTapeFloor_diffuse_v0006.1051.exr
Still not exactly beautiful, but when you have strings longer than 80 characters as keys, it's about as good as you can reasonably expect.
If you model (part of) the filesystem hierarchy in your object hierarchy, or create aliases (or dynamic aliasers) for parts of the tree, etc., the YAML will look a lot nicer. But that's something you have to actually do at the object-model level; as far as YAML is concerned, those long paths full of repeated prefixes are just strings.
What is the best way to generate a unique key for the contents of a dictionary. My intention is to store each dictionary in a document store along with a unique id or hash so that I don't have to load the whole dictionary from the store to check if it exists already or not. Dictionaries with the same keys and values should generate the same id or hash.
I have the following code:
import hashlib
a={'name':'Danish', 'age':107}
b={'age':107, 'name':'Danish'}
print str(a)
print hashlib.sha1(str(a)).hexdigest()
print hashlib.sha1(str(b)).hexdigest()
The last two print statements generate the same string. Is this is a good implementation? or are there any pitfalls with this approach? Is there a better way to do this?
Update
Combining suggestions from the answers below, the following might be a good implementation
import hashlib
a={'name':'Danish', 'age':107}
b={'age':107, 'name':'Danish'}
def get_id_for_dict(dict):
unique_str = ''.join(["'%s':'%s';"%(key, val) for (key, val) in sorted(dict.items())])
return hashlib.sha1(unique_str).hexdigest()
print get_id_for_dict(a)
print get_id_for_dict(b)
I prefer serializing the dict as JSON and hashing that:
import hashlib
import json
a={'name':'Danish', 'age':107}
b={'age':107, 'name':'Danish'}
# Python 2
print hashlib.sha1(json.dumps(a, sort_keys=True)).hexdigest()
print hashlib.sha1(json.dumps(b, sort_keys=True)).hexdigest()
# Python 3
print(hashlib.sha1(json.dumps(a, sort_keys=True).encode()).hexdigest())
print(hashlib.sha1(json.dumps(b, sort_keys=True).encode()).hexdigest())
Returns:
71083588011445f0e65e11c80524640668d3797d
71083588011445f0e65e11c80524640668d3797d
No - you can't rely on particular order of elements when converting dictionary to a string.
You can, however, convert it to sorted list of (key,value) tuples, convert it to a string and compute a hash like this:
a_sorted_list = [(key, a[key]) for key in sorted(a.keys())]
print hashlib.sha1( str(a_sorted_list) ).hexdigest()
It's not fool-proof, as a formating of a list converted to a string or formatting of a tuple can change in some future major python version, sort order depends on locale etc. but I think it can be good enough.
A possible option would be using a serialized representation of the list that preserves order. I am not sure whether the default list to string mechanism imposes any kind of order, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were interpreter-dependent. So, I'd basically build something akin to urlencode that sorts the keys beforehand.
Not that I believe that you method would fail, but I'd rather play with predictable things and avoid undocumented and/or unpredictable behavior. It's true that despite "unordered", dictionaries end up having an order that may even be consistent, but the point is that you shouldn't take that for granted.