Question

In Clojure, I would like to combine several maps into a single map where mappings with same key are combined into a list.

For example:

{:humor :happy} {:humor :sad} {:humor :happy} {:weather :sunny}

should lead to:

{:weather :sunny, :humor (:happy :sad :happy)}

I thought about:

(merge-with (comp flatten list) data)

But it is not efficient because flatten has O(n) complexity.

Then I came up with:

(defn agg[x y] (if (coll? x) (cons y x) (list y x)))
(merge-with agg data)

But it feels not idiomatic. Any other idea?

Answer 1

One approach would be

(defn merge-lists [& maps]
  (reduce (fn [m1 m2]
            (reduce (fn [m [k v]]
                      (update-in m [k] (fnil conj []) v))
                    m1, m2))
          {}
          maps))

It’s a bit ugly, but that’s only because your values aren’t already lists. It also forces everything to be a list (so you’d get :weather [:sunny] rather than :weather :sunny). Frankly, this is likely to be a million times easier for you to work with anyway.

If you had each value as a vector already, you could simply do (apply merge-with into maps). So, another thing you could try would be to convert to vectors first, and then do the simple merge-with. This probably performs a bit worse than the first approach because of the intermediate data structures.

(defn merge-lists [& maps]
  (apply merge-with into
         (for [m maps, [k v] m]
           {k [v]})))