How can I merge two hashes without overwritten duplicate keys in Ruby?

Question

Is there an easy or elegant way to merge two hashes without overwriting duplicate keys?

That is, if the key is present in the original hash I don\'t want to

Answer 1

There is a way in standard Ruby library to merge Hashes without overwriting existing values or reassigning the hash.

important_hash.merge!(defaults) { |key, important, default| important }