Merge two dictionaries and keep the values for duplicate keys in Python

Question

Let\'s suppose that I have two dictionaries:

dic1 =  { \"first\":1, \"second\":4, \"third\":8} 
dic2 =  { \"first\":9, \"second\":5, \"fourth\":3}

Answer 1

In general, I would say it's bad practice to cast the values of different keys as different object types. I would simply do something like:

def merge_values(val1, val2):
    if val1 is None:
        return [val2]
    elif val2 is None:
        return [val1]
    else:
        return [val1, val2]
dict3 = {
    key: merge_values(dic1.get(key), dic2.get(key))
    for key in set(dic1).union(dic2)
}