How to get the difference between two dictionaries in Python?

Question

I have two dictionaries. I need to find the difference between the two which should give me both key and value.

I have searched and found some addons/packages like d

Answer 1

You were right to look at using a set, we just need to dig in a little deeper to get your method to work.

First, the example code:

test_1 = {"foo": "bar", "FOO": "BAR"}
test_2 = {"foo": "bar", "f00": "b@r"}

We can see right now that both dictionaries contain a similar key/value pair:

{"foo": "bar", ...}

Each dictionary also contains a completely different key value pair. But how do we detect the difference? Dictionaries don't support that. Instead, you'll want to use a set.

Here is how to turn each dictionary into a set we can use:

set_1 = set(test_1.items())
set_2 = set(test_2.items())

This returns a set containing a series of tuples. Each tuple represents one key/value pair from your dictionary.

Now, to find the difference between set_1 and set_2:

print set_1 - set_2
>>> {('FOO', 'BAR')}

Want a dictionary back? Easy, just:

dict(set_1 - set_2)
>>> {'FOO': 'BAR'}