How to Sort Dictionary by Value in C#

1. Sort Dictionary by Value With the List Method in C#
2. Sort Dictionary by Value With the Linq Method in C#

This tutorial will introduce methods to sort a dictionary by value in C#.

Sort Dictionary by Value With the List Method in C#

The C# dictionary data structure stores data in the form of key:value pairs. Unfortunately, there is no built-in method to sort a dictionary by value in C#. We have to convert the dictionary to a list of tuples and then sort the list. The following code example shows us how to sort a dictionary by value with a list in C#.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

namespace sort_dictionary_by_value {
  class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
      Dictionary<string, int> myDict = new Dictionary<string, int>();
      myDict.Add("one", 1);
      myDict.Add("four", 4);
      myDict.Add("two", 2);
      myDict.Add("three", 3);
      var myList = myDict.ToList();

      myList.Sort((pair1, pair2) => pair1.Value.CompareTo(pair2.Value));
      foreach (var value in myList) {
        Console.WriteLine(value);
      }
    }
  }
}

Output:

[one, 1]
[two, 2]
[three, 3]
[four, 4]

We created the dictionary myDict and sorted it by the integer value. We first converted the myDict to the list of tuples myList with the ToList() function in C#. We then sorted the myList with Linq and displayed the values.

Sort Dictionary by Value With the Linq Method in C#

We can also directly sort a dictionary by value without converting it to a list first. The Linq or language integrated query is used to perform SQL-like queries in C#. We can use Linq to sort a dictionary by value. The following code example shows us how to sort a dictionary by value with Linq in C#.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

namespace sort_dictionary_by_value {
  class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
      Dictionary<string, int> myDict = new Dictionary<string, int>();
      myDict.Add("one", 1);
      myDict.Add("four", 4);
      myDict.Add("two", 2);
      myDict.Add("three", 3);

      var sortedDict = from entry in myDict orderby entry.Value ascending select entry;
      foreach (var value in sortedDict) {
        Console.WriteLine(value);
      }
    }
  }
}

Output:

[one, 1]
[two, 2]
[three, 3]
[four, 4]

We created the dictionary myDict and sorted it by the integer value with Linq in C#. We stored the sorted dictionary inside sortedDict and displayed the values.