Append a dictionary to a dictionary [duplicate]

Answer 1

Assuming that you do not want to change orig, you can either do a copy and update like the other answers, or you can create a new dictionary in one step by passing all items from both dictionaries into the dict constructor:

from itertools import chain
dest = dict(chain(orig.items(), extra.items()))

Or without itertools:

dest = dict(list(orig.items()) + list(extra.items()))

Note that you only need to pass the result of items() into list() on Python 3, on 2.x dict.items() already returns a list so you can just do dict(orig.items() + extra.items()).

As a more general use case, say you have a larger list of dicts that you want to combine into a single dict, you could do something like this:

from itertools import chain
dest = dict(chain.from_iterable(map(dict.items, list_of_dicts)))

Answer 2

There is the .update() method :)

update([other]) Update the dictionary with the key/value pairs from other, overwriting existing keys. Return None.

update() accepts either another dictionary object or an iterable of key/value pairs (as tuples or other iterables of length two). If keyword arguments are specified, the dictionary is then updated with those key/value pairs: d.update(red=1, blue=2).

Changed in version 2.4: Allowed the argument to be an iterable of key/value pairs and allowed keyword arguments.

Answer 3

The most Pythonic (and slightly faster) way to accomplish this is by:

dest = {**orig, **extra}

Or, depending on the problem to solve, maybe:

dest = {**orig, 'D': 4, 'E': 5}

Answer 4

dict.update() looks like it will do what you want...

>> orig.update(extra)
>>> orig
{'A': 1, 'C': 3, 'B': 2, 'E': 5, 'D': 4}
>>> 

Perhaps, though, you don't want to update your original dictionary, but work on a copy:

>>> dest = orig.copy()
>>> dest.update(extra)
>>> orig
{'A': 1, 'C': 3, 'B': 2}
>>> dest
{'A': 1, 'C': 3, 'B': 2, 'E': 5, 'D': 4}

Answer 5

A three-liner to combine or merge two dictionaries:

dest = {}
dest.update(orig)
dest.update(extra)

This creates a new dictionary dest without modifying orig and extra.

Note: If a key has different values in orig and extra, then extra overrides orig.

Answer 6

You can do

orig.update(extra)

or, if you don't want orig to be modified, make a copy first:

dest = dict(orig)  # or orig.copy()
dest.update(extra)

Note that if extra and orig have overlapping keys, the final value will be taken from extra. For example,

>>> d1 = {1: 1, 2: 2}
>>> d2 = {2: 'ha!', 3: 3}
>>> d1.update(d2)
>>> d1
{1: 1, 2: 'ha!', 3: 3}