MRJob sort reducer output

Question

Is there any way to sort the output of reducer function using mrjob?

I think that the input to reducer function is sorted by the key and I tried to exploit this feature to sort the output using another reducer like below where I know values have numeric values, I want to count number of each key and sort keys according to this count:

def mapper_1(self, key, line):
    key = #extract key from the line
    yield (key, 1)

def reducer_1(self, key, values):
    yield key, sum(values)

def mapper_2(self, key, count):
    yield ('%020d' % int(count), key)

def reducer_2(self, count, keys):
    for key in keys:
        yield key, int(count)

but it's output is not correctly sorted! I suspected that this weird behavior is due to manipulating int s as string and tried to format it as this link says but It didn't worked!

IMPORTANT NOTE: When I use the debugger to see the order of output of reducer_2 the order is correct but what is printed as output is something else!!!

IMPORTANT NOTE 2: On another computer the same program on the same data returns output sorted as expected!

Answer 1

You can sort the values as integers in second reducer and then converting them in to the zero padded representation:

import re

from mrjob.job import MRJob
from mrjob.step import MRStep

WORD_RE = re.compile(r"[\w']+")


class MRWordFrequencyCount(MRJob):

    def steps(self):
        return [
            MRStep(
                mapper=self.mapper_extract_words, combiner=self.combine_word_counts,
                reducer=self.reducer_sum_word_counts
            ),
            MRStep(
                reducer=self.reduce_sort_counts
            )
        ]

    def mapper_extract_words(self, _, line):
        for word in WORD_RE.findall(line):
            yield word.lower(), 1

    def combine_word_counts(self, word, counts):
        yield word, sum(counts)

    def reducer_sum_word_counts(self, key, values):
        yield None, (sum(values), key)

    def reduce_sort_counts(self, _, word_counts):
        for count, key in sorted(word_counts, reverse=True):
            yield ('%020d' % int(count), key)

Well this is sorting the output in memory, which migtht be a problem depending on the size of the input. But you want it sorted so it has to be sorted somehow.