Sort dictionary by value, then by key

Since you want to sort with one key (the value) in descending order and a secondary key (the name) in ascending order, simply reversing the sorting order would not work. Instead, you should construct a tuple of the value and the name, with the value negated to sort it in descending order:

sorted(dictionary.items(), key=lambda t: (-t[1], t[0]))

Option1

This is he more modern solution that will only work in python3.x, this is the same aproach the question took.Instead of t[::-1] being the index you need to use t: (-t[1], t[0]) .-t[1] sorts the names in ascending order because it has been negted. t[0]sorts keys in descending order. Here is the code:

dictionary = {"Sophie": 23, "Alfred": 23, "Zelda":22, "Betty":23}
reversed_dict= dict(sorted(dictionary.items(), key=lambda t: (-t[1], t[0])))
print(reversed_dict)

Output:

{'Alfred': 23, 'Betty': 23, 'Sophie': 23, 'Zelda': 22}

Option2

This is the more portable solution and works in all versions of python.This aproach requires you to import the operator library bfore you can begin. sorted(dictionary.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(0)) sorts the names in ascending order then sorted(reversed_dict, key=operator.itemgetter(1), reverse=True)) orders the keys in descending order.

Here is the code:

import operator

dictionary = {"Sophie": 23, "Alfred": 23, "Zelda":22, "Betty":23}
reversed_dict = sorted(dictionary.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(0))
reversed_dict = dict(sorted(reversed_dict, key=operator.itemgetter(1), reverse=True))
print(reversed_dict)

Output:

{'Alfred': 23, 'Betty': 23, 'Sophie': 23, 'Zelda': 22}