Is there any pythonic way to combine two dicts (ad

Question

For example I have two dicts:

Dict A: {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3}
Dict B: {'b': 3, 'c': 4, 'd': 5}

I need a pythonic way of 'combining' two dicts such that the result is:

{'a': 1, 'b': 5, 'c': 7, 'd': 5}

That is to say: if a key appears in both dicts, add their values, if it appears in only one dict, keep its value.

Answer 1

A more generic solution, which works for non-numeric values as well:

a = {'a': 'foo', 'b':'bar', 'c': 'baz'}
b = {'a': 'spam', 'c':'ham', 'x': 'blah'}

r = dict(a.items() + b.items() +
    [(k, a[k] + b[k]) for k in set(b) & set(a)])

or even more generic:

def combine_dicts(a, b, op=operator.add):
    return dict(a.items() + b.items() +
        [(k, op(a[k], b[k])) for k in set(b) & set(a)])

For example:

>>> a = {'a': 2, 'b':3, 'c':4}
>>> b = {'a': 5, 'c':6, 'x':7}

>>> import operator
>>> print combine_dicts(a, b, operator.mul)
{'a': 10, 'x': 7, 'c': 24, 'b': 3}

Answer 2

This solution is easy to use, it is used as a normal dictionary, but you can use the sum function.

class SumDict(dict):
    def __add__(self, y):
        return {x: self.get(x, 0) + y.get(x, 0) for x in set(self).union(y)}

A = SumDict({'a': 1, 'c': 2})
B = SumDict({'b': 3, 'c': 4})  # Also works: B = {'b': 3, 'c': 4}
print(A + B)  # OUTPUT {'a': 1, 'b': 3, 'c': 6}

Answer 3

The best to use is dict():

A = {'a':1, 'b':2, 'c':3}
B = {'b':3, 'c':4, 'd':5}
Merged = dict(A, **B)
Merged == {'a':1, 'b':3, 'c':3, 'd':5}

Answer 4

Definitely summing the Counter()s is the most pythonic way to go in such cases but only if it results in a positive value. Here is an example and as you can see there is no c in result after negating the c's value in B dictionary.

In [1]: from collections import Counter

In [2]: A = Counter({'a':1, 'b':2, 'c':3})

In [3]: B = Counter({'b':3, 'c':-4, 'd':5})

In [4]: A + B
Out[4]: Counter({'d': 5, 'b': 5, 'a': 1})

That's because Counters were primarily designed to work with positive integers to represent running counts (negative count is meaningless). But to help with those use cases,python documents the minimum range and type restrictions as follows:

• The Counter class itself is a dictionary subclass with no restrictions on its keys and values. The values are intended to be numbers representing counts, but you could store anything in the value field.
• The most_common() method requires only that the values be orderable.
• For in-place operations such as c[key] += 1, the value type need only support addition and subtraction. So fractions, floats, and decimals would work and negative values are supported. The same is also true for update() and subtract() which allow negative and zero values for both inputs and outputs.
• The multiset methods are designed only for use cases with positive values. The inputs may be negative or zero, but only outputs with positive values are created. There are no type restrictions, but the value type needs to support addition, subtraction, and comparison.
• The elements() method requires integer counts. It ignores zero and negative counts.

So for getting around that problem after summing your Counter you can use Counter.update in order to get the desire output. It works like dict.update() but adds counts instead of replacing them.

In [24]: A.update(B)

In [25]: A
Out[25]: Counter({'d': 5, 'b': 5, 'a': 1, 'c': -1})

Answer 5

def merge_with(f, xs, ys):
    xs = a_copy_of(xs) # dict(xs), maybe generalizable?
    for (y, v) in ys.iteritems():
        xs[y] = v if y not in xs else f(xs[x], v)

merge_with((lambda x, y: x + y), A, B)

You could easily generalize this:

def merge_dicts(f, *dicts):
    result = {}
    for d in dicts:
        for (k, v) in d.iteritems():
            result[k] = v if k not in result else f(result[k], v)

Then it can take any number of dicts.

Answer 6

From python 3.5: merging and summing

Thanks to @tokeinizer_fsj that told me in a comment that I didn't get completely the meaning of the question (I thought that add meant just adding keys that eventually where different in the two dictinaries and, instead, i meant that the common key values should be summed). So I added that loop before the merging, so that the second dictionary contains the sum of the common keys. The last dictionary will be the one whose values will last in the new dictionary that is the result of the merging of the two, so I thing the problem is solved. The solution is valid from python 3.5 and following versions.

a = {
    "a": 1,
    "b": 2,
    "c": 3
}

b = {
    "a": 2,
    "b": 3,
    "d": 5
}

# Python 3.5

for key in b:
    if key in a:
        b[key] = b[key] + a[key]

c = {**a, **b}
print(c)

>>> c
{'a': 3, 'b': 5, 'c': 3, 'd': 5}

Reusable code

a = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3}
b = {'b': 3, 'c': 4, 'd': 5}


def mergsum(a, b):
    for k in b:
        if k in a:
            b[k] = b[k] + a[k]
    c = {**a, **b}
    return c


print(mergsum(a, b))