Sort nested dictionary by variable number of keys

Basically, what you are looking for is itemgetter with range:

from operator import itemgetter standings = ... # your dictionary of dictionaries n = 5 # number of keys to sort on (1, 2, 3, ..., n) # The following will collect values by 'points', 1, 2, ..., n in a tuple: get_values = itemgetter('points', *range(1, n + 1)) result = sorted(standings, key=lambda x: get_values(standings[x]), reverse=True) # [2, 1, 3] 

Explanation:

In order to achieve the sorting by several dict keys, you could use itemgetter to create a function that will return a tuple of values by specified keys. So, as a simple example, if you would have this dictionary:

my_dict = {1: 10, 2: 20, 3: 30, 4: 40, 5: 50, 'player': 'Ben'} 

and you would want to get the values by keys player, 1 and 2, you would write:

from operator import itemgetter get_values = itemgetter('player', 1, 2) get_values(my_dict) # ('Ben', 10, 20) 

Now, as the number of the values can vary and those are actually ordered integers (1, 2, 3, ...), you could unpack the given range to the itemgetter:

get_values = itemgetter('player', *range(1, 4)) # 'player', 1, 2, 3 get_values(my_dict) # ('Ben', 10, 20, 30) 

Finally, for your given example dictionary of dictionaries we get these tuples for each child dictionary and sort by them:

standings = {1: {1: 1, 2: 0, 3: 1, 4: 0, 5: 0, 'player': 'Jack', 'points': 15}, 2: {1: 1, 2: 0, 3: 2, 4: 2, 5: 0, 'player': 'Kate', 'points': 15}, 3: {1: 0, 2: 0, 3: 1, 4: 0, 5: 0, 'player': 'Sawyer', 'points': 5}} max_key = 5 # you may also calculate it as a max integer key get_values = itemgetter('points', *range(1, n + 1)) result = sorted(standings, key=lambda x: get_values(standings[x])) # [3, 1, 2] # or reversed: sorted(standings, key=lambda x: get_keys(standings[x]), reverse=True) # [2, 1, 3]