Is there any pythonic way to combine two dicts (adding values for keys that appear in both)?

Question

For example I have two dicts:

Dict A: {\'a\': 1, \'b\': 2, \'c\': 3}
Dict B: {\'b\': 3, \'c\': 4, \'d\': 5}

I need a pythonic way of \'comb

Answer 1

The one with no extra imports!

Their is a pythonic standard called EAFP(Easier to Ask for Forgiveness than Permission). Below code is based on that python standard.

# The A and B dictionaries
A = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3}
B = {'b': 3, 'c': 4, 'd': 5}

# The final dictionary. Will contain the final outputs.
newdict = {}

# Make sure every key of A and B get into the final dictionary 'newdict'.
newdict.update(A)
newdict.update(B)

# Iterate through each key of A.
for i in A.keys():

    # If same key exist on B, its values from A and B will add together and
    # get included in the final dictionary 'newdict'.
    try:
        addition = A[i] + B[i]
        newdict[i] = addition

    # If current key does not exist in dictionary B, it will give a KeyError,
    # catch it and continue looping.
    except KeyError:
        continue

EDIT: thanks to jerzyk for his improvement suggestions.

Answer 2

For a more generic and extensible way check mergedict. It uses singledispatch and can merge values based on its types.

Example:

from mergedict import MergeDict

class SumDict(MergeDict):
    @MergeDict.dispatch(int)
    def merge_int(this, other):
        return this + other

d2 = SumDict({'a': 1, 'b': 'one'})
d2.merge({'a':2, 'b': 'two'})

assert d2 == {'a': 3, 'b': 'two'}

Answer 3

What about:

def dict_merge_and_sum( d1, d2 ):
    ret = d1
    ret.update({ k:v + d2[k] for k,v in d1.items() if k in d2 })
    ret.update({ k:v for k,v in d2.items() if k not in d1 })
    return ret

A = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3}
B = {'b': 3, 'c': 4, 'd': 5}

print( dict_merge_and_sum( A, B ) )

Output:

{'d': 5, 'a': 1, 'c': 7, 'b': 5}

Answer 4

This is a simple solution for merging two dictionaries where += can be applied to the values, it has to iterate over a dictionary only once

a = {'a':1, 'b':2, 'c':3}

dicts = [{'b':3, 'c':4, 'd':5},
         {'c':9, 'a':9, 'd':9}]

def merge_dicts(merged,mergedfrom):
    for k,v in mergedfrom.items():
        if k in merged:
            merged[k] += v
        else:
            merged[k] = v
    return merged

for dct in dicts:
    a = merge_dicts(a,dct)
print (a)
#{'c': 16, 'b': 5, 'd': 14, 'a': 10}

Answer 5

The above solutions are great for the scenario where you have a small number of Counters. If you have a big list of them though, something like this is much nicer:

from collections import Counter

A = Counter({'a':1, 'b':2, 'c':3})
B = Counter({'b':3, 'c':4, 'd':5}) 
C = Counter({'a': 5, 'e':3})
list_of_counts = [A, B, C]

total = sum(list_of_counts, Counter())

print(total)
# Counter({'c': 7, 'a': 6, 'b': 5, 'd': 5, 'e': 3})

The above solution is essentially summing the Counters by:

total = Counter()
for count in list_of_counts:
    total += count
print(total)
# Counter({'c': 7, 'a': 6, 'b': 5, 'd': 5, 'e': 3})

This does the same thing but I think it always helps to see what it is effectively doing underneath.