Question

I have a helper that merges two or more IDictionary<TKey, TValue> objects into one IDictionary<TKey, string> by concatenating the TValue‘s ToString() methods like so:

public class DictionaryHelper<TKey, TValue>
{
    public static IDictionary<TKey, string> MergeDictionaries<TKey, TValue>(params IDictionary<TKey, TValue>[] dictionaries) where TValue : class
    {
        var returnValue = new Dictionary<TKey, string>();
        foreach (var dictionary in dictionaries)
        {
            foreach (var kvp in dictionary)
            {
                if (returnValue.ContainsKey(kvp.Key))
                {
                    returnValue[kvp.Key] += kvp.Value.ToString();
                }
                else
                {
                    returnValue[kvp.Key] = kvp.Value.ToString();
                }
            }
        }
        return returnValue;
    }

}

While this is straightforward and pretty easy to read, it seems like there should be a more efficient way to do this. Is there?

Answer 1

I don’t know if this is more efficient, but at least it’s much shorter:

var result = dictionaries.SelectMany(d => d)
                         .ToLookup(kvp => kvp.Key, kvp => kvp.Value)
                         .ToDictionary(g => g.Key, g => string.Concat(g));