Question

I need to merge multiple dictionaries, here’s what I have for instance:

dict1 = {1:{"a":{"A"}}, 2:{"b":{"B"}}}

dict2 = {2:{"c":{"C"}}, 3:{"d":{"D"}}}

With A B C and D being leaves of the tree, like {"info1":"value", "info2":"value2"}

There is an unknown level(depth) of dictionaries, it could be {2:{"c":{"z":{"y":{C}}}}}

In my case it represents a directory/files structure with nodes being docs and leaves being files.

I want to merge them to obtain:

 dict3 = {1:{"a":{"A"}}, 2:{"b":{"B"},"c":{"C"}}, 3:{"d":{"D"}}}

I’m not sure how I could do that easily with Python.

Answer 1

This is actually quite tricky – particularly if you want a useful error message when things are inconsistent, while correctly accepting duplicate but consistent entries (something no other answer here does..)

Assuming you don’t have huge numbers of entries, a recursive function is easiest:

def merge(a: dict, b: dict, path=[]):
    for key in b:
        if key in a:
            if isinstance(a[key], dict) and isinstance(b[key], dict):
                merge(a[key], b[key], path + [str(key)])
            elif a[key] != b[key]:
                raise Exception('Conflict at ' + '.'.join(path + [str(key)]))
        else:
            a[key] = b[key]
    return a

# works
print(merge({1:{"a":"A"},2:{"b":"B"}}, {2:{"c":"C"},3:{"d":"D"}}))
# has conflict
merge({1:{"a":"A"},2:{"b":"B"}}, {1:{"a":"A"},2:{"b":"C"}})

note that this mutates a – the contents of b are added to a (which is also returned). If you want to keep a you could call it like merge(dict(a), b).

agf pointed out (below) that you may have more than two dicts, in which case you can use:

from functools import reduce
reduce(merge, [dict1, dict2, dict3...])

where everything will be added to dict1.

Note: I edited my initial answer to mutate the first argument; that makes the "reduce" easier to explain