Swapping Content of Two Dictionaries.

[Peter Otten]

Hatem Oraby wrote:

> Hello, I want to swap the content of two dictionaries, the obvious way to
> do it is:
> a = {1:"I'am A"}
> b = {2:"I'm B"}
> temp = a
> a = b
> b = temp

That can be simplified to

a, b = b, a

and is almost certainly the right approach.

> tempKeys = a.keys()
> diffKeys = a.keys()  - b.keys()   #I do it using set()s
> 
> #item = a
> temp = {}
> for key in a.keys():
>    item[key] = a[key]
> 
> for key in diffKeys:
>     del a[key] #delete stuff that exist in a but not b.
> 
> for key in b.keys():
>     a[key] = b[key]
> 
> b = temp
> 
> This works great as the content referenced by the dictionary is changed
> rather than changing the reference of dictionary itself so it's reflected
> by any "scope" that references the dictionary.
> 
> My problem is that i need to do this operation a LOT, simply I got a
> problem that my program go through a very long loop and inside this loop
> this operation is needed to be done twice and the dictionary size ain't
> very small.

You could try

>>> a = {"a": 1, "b": 2}
>>> b = {"b": 3, "c": 4}
>>> t = a.copy()
>>> a.clear()
>>> a.update(b)
>>> b.clear()
>>> b.update(t)
>>> a
{'c': 4, 'b': 3}
>>> b
{'a': 1, 'b': 2}

> If anyone has a suggestion one how to do it faster then please feel free
> and welcome to contribute.

> Anyway, I decided to go and implement it in C to gain performance, And

Premature optimization? If you explain what you are trying to achieve 
someone might come up with a way to do it without swapping dict contents.

Peter