A little known fact is that you don’t need to construct set
s to do this:
In Python 2:
In [78]: d1 = {'a': 1, 'b': 2}
In [79]: d2 = {'b': 2, 'c': 3}
In [80]: d1.viewkeys() & d2.viewkeys()
Out[80]: {'b'}
In Python 3 replace viewkeys
with keys
; the same applies to viewvalues
and viewitems
.
From the documentation of viewitems
:
In [113]: d1.viewitems??
Type: builtin_function_or_method
String Form:<built-in method viewitems of dict object at 0x64a61b0>
Docstring: D.viewitems() -> a set-like object providing a view on D's items
For larger dict
s this also slightly faster than constructing set
s and then intersecting them:
In [122]: d1 = {i: rand() for i in range(10000)}
In [123]: d2 = {i: rand() for i in range(10000)}
In [124]: timeit d1.viewkeys() & d2.viewkeys()
1000 loops, best of 3: 714 µs per loop
In [125]: %%timeit
s1 = set(d1)
s2 = set(d2)
res = s1 & s2
1000 loops, best of 3: 805 µs per loop
For smaller `dict`s `set` construction is faster:
In [126]: d1 = {'a': 1, 'b': 2}
In [127]: d2 = {'b': 2, 'c': 3}
In [128]: timeit d1.viewkeys() & d2.viewkeys()
1000000 loops, best of 3: 591 ns per loop
In [129]: %%timeit
s1 = set(d1)
s2 = set(d2)
res = s1 & s2
1000000 loops, best of 3: 477 ns per loop
We’re comparing nanoseconds here, which may or may not matter to you. In any case, you get back a set
, so using viewkeys
/keys
eliminates a bit of clutter.