How to merge dictionaries of dictionaries?

Question

I need to merge multiple dictionaries, here\'s what I have for instance:

dict1 = {1:{\"a\":{A}}, 2:{\"b\":{B}}}

dict2 = {2:{\"c\":{C}}, 3:{\"d\":{D}}
         


        

Answer 1

I have an iterative solution - works much much better with big dicts & a lot of them (for example jsons etc):

import collections


def merge_dict_with_subdicts(dict1: dict, dict2: dict) -> dict:
    """
    similar behaviour to builtin dict.update - but knows how to handle nested dicts
    """
    q = collections.deque([(dict1, dict2)])
    while len(q) > 0:
        d1, d2 = q.pop()
        for k, v in d2.items():
            if k in d1 and isinstance(d1[k], dict) and isinstance(v, dict):
                q.append((d1[k], v))
            else:
                d1[k] = v

    return dict1

note that this will use the value in d2 to override d1, in case they are not both dicts. (same as python's dict.update())

some tests:

def test_deep_update():
    d = dict()
    merge_dict_with_subdicts(d, {"a": 4})
    assert d == {"a": 4}

    new_dict = {
        "b": {
            "c": {
                "d": 6
            }
        }
    }
    merge_dict_with_subdicts(d, new_dict)
    assert d == {
        "a": 4,
        "b": {
            "c": {
                "d": 6
            }
        }
    }

    new_dict = {
        "a": 3,
        "b": {
            "f": 7
        }
    }
    merge_dict_with_subdicts(d, new_dict)
    assert d == {
        "a": 3,
        "b": {
            "c": {
                "d": 6
            },
            "f": 7
        }
    }

    # test a case where one of the dicts has dict as value and the other has something else
    new_dict = {
        'a': {
            'b': 4
        }
    }
    merge_dict_with_subdicts(d, new_dict)
    assert d['a']['b'] == 4

I've tested with around ~1200 dicts - this method took 0.4 seconds, while the recursive solution took ~2.5 seconds.