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How to Preserve Order When Merging Two Dictionaries in Python 3.8 with Duplicate Keys?

šŸ‘€ Views: 1491 šŸ’¬ Answers: 1 šŸ“… Created: 2025-07-17
python dictionary merging

I'm refactoring my project and I'm trying to implement I'm writing unit tests and This might be a silly question, but I'm trying to merge two dictionaries in Python 3.8, but I want to ensure that the order of keys is preserved, especially when there are duplicate keys. I currently have the following dictionaries: ```python dict1 = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3} dict2 = {'b': 4, 'd': 5} ``` My goal is to merge these two dictionaries in a way that retains the order of keys from `dict1` and only updates the value for key 'b' from `dict2`. I tried using the `update` method like this: ```python dict1.update(dict2) ``` But this overwrites the value for key 'b', and I also lose the order I want. I also considered using a dictionary comprehension, but I'm not sure how to properly implement that to handle duplicates while keeping the original order. The expected output should be: ```python {'a': 1, 'b': 4, 'c': 3, 'd': 5} ``` What approaches can I use to achieve this without losing the order or values from `dict1`? I've also looked into the `collections.ChainMap`, but I’m unsure if that's the right fit for this situation. Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm working with Python in a Docker container on macOS. For context: I'm using Python on Ubuntu 20.04. Has anyone else encountered this? My team is using Python for this REST API. Hoping someone can shed some light on this. I'm using Python 3.9 in this project.