sorting - Sort a dictionary by value in JavaScript

Question

Here is my dictionary:

const dict = {
  "x" : 1,
  "y" : 6,
  "z" : 9,
  "a" : 5,
  "b" : 7,
  "c" : 11,
  "d" : 17,
  "t" : 3
};

I need a way to sort my dict dictionary from the least to the greatest or from the greatest to the least. Or even it would be fine I had an array with the sorted keys in it. But I do not know how to do such thing using javascript. I have done it before using python, like this:

import heapq
from operator import itemgetter

thirty_largest = heapq.nlargest(8, dict.iteritems(), key=itemgetter(1))

I have searched for it in Google and I found that arrays have sort() function but not dictionaries. So my question is: How can I sort the dictionary or get top 5 biggest values in sort order?

Answer 1

It may not be straight forward in JavaScript.

var dict = {
  "x": 1,
  "y": 6,
  "z": 9,
  "a": 5,
  "b": 7,
  "c": 11,
  "d": 17,
  "t": 3
};

// Create items array
var items = Object.keys(dict).map(function(key) {
  return [key, dict[key]];
});

// Sort the array based on the second element
items.sort(function(first, second) {
  return second[1] - first[1];
});

// Create a new array with only the first 5 items
console.log(items.slice(0, 5));