Comparing like words between two dictionaries - python-3.x

Question

I am using python 3.x,
I have 2 dictionaries (both very large but will substitute here). The values of the dictionaries contain more than one word:
dict_a = {'key1': 'Large left panel', 'key2': 'Orange bear rug', 'key3': 'Luxo jr. lamp'}
dict_a
{'key1': 'Large left panel',
'key2': 'Orange bear rug',
'key3': 'Luxo jr. lamp'}
dict_b = {'keyX': 'titanium panel', 'keyY': 'orange Ball and chain', 'keyZ': 'large bear musket'}
dict_b
{'keyX': 'titanium panel',
'keyY': 'orange Ball and chain',
'keyZ': 'large bear musket'}
I am looking for a way to compare the individual words contained in the values of dict_a to the words contained in the values of dict_b and return a dictionary or data-frame that contains the word, and the keys from dict_a and dict_b it is associated with:
My desired output (not formatted any certain way):
bear: key2 (from dict_a), keyZ(from dict_b)
Luxo: key3
orange: key2 (from dict_a), keyY (from dict_b)
I've got code that works for looking up a specific word in a single dictionary but it's not sufficient for what I need to accomplish here:
def search(myDict, lookup):
aDict = {}
for key, value in myDict.items():
for v in value:
if lookup in v:
aDict[key] = value
return aDict
print (key, value)

Answer 1

dicts = {'a': {'key1': 'Large left panel', 'key2': 'Orange bear rug',
'key3': 'Luxo jr. lamp'},
'b': {'keyX': 'titanium panel', 'keyY': 'orange Ball and chain',
'keyZ': 'large bear musket'} }
from collections import defaultdict
index = defaultdict(list)
for dname, d in dicts.items():
for key, words in d.items():
for word in words.lower().split(): # lower() to make Orange/orange match
index[word].append((dname, key))
index now contains:
{'and' : [('b', 'keyY')],
'ball' : [('b', 'keyY')],
'bear' : [('a', 'key2'), ('b', 'keyZ')],
'chain' : [('b', 'keyY')],
'jr.' : [('a', 'key3')],
'lamp' : [('a', 'key3')],
'large' : [('a', 'key1'), ('b', 'keyZ')],
'left' : [('a', 'key1')],
'luxo' : [('a', 'key3')],
'musket' : [('b', 'keyZ')],
'orange' : [('a', 'key2'), ('b', 'keyY')],
'panel' : [('a', 'key1'), ('b', 'keyX')],
'rug' : [('a', 'key2')],
'titanium': [('b', 'keyX')] }
Update to comments
Since your actual dictionary is a mapping from string to list (and not string to string) change your loops to
for dname, d in dicts.items():
for key, wordlist in d.items(): # changed "words" to "wordlist"
for words in wordlist: # added extra loop to iterate over wordlist
for word in words.split(): # removed .lower() since text is always uppercase
index[word].append((dname, key))
Since your lists have only one item you could just do
for dname, d in dicts.items():
for key, wordlist in d.items():
for word in wordlist[0].split(): # assumes single item list
index[word].append((dname, key))
If you have words that you don't want to be added to your index you can skip adding them to the index:
words_to_skip = {'-', ';', '/', 'AND', 'TO', 'UP', 'WITH', ''}
Then filter them out with
if word in words_to_skip:
continue
I noticed that you have some words surrounded by parenthesis (such as (342) and (221)). If you want to get rid the parenthesis do
if word[0] == '(' and word[-1] == ')':
word = word[1:-1]
Putting this all together we get
words_to_skip = {'-', ';', '/', 'AND', 'TO', 'UP', 'WITH', ''}
for dname, d in dicts.items():
for key, wordlist in d.items():
for word in wordlist[0].split(): # assumes single item list
if word[0] == '(' and word[-1] == ')':
word = word[1:-1] # remove outer parenthesis
if word in words_to_skip: # skip unwanted words
continue
index[word].append((dname, key))

Answer 2

I think you can do what you want pretty easily. This code produces output in the format {word: {key: name_of_dict_the_key_is_in}}:
def search(**dicts):
result = {}
for name, dct in dicts.items():
for key, value in dct.items():
for word in value.split():
result.setdefault(word, {})[key] = name
return result
You call it with the input dictionaries as keyword arguments. The keyword you use for each dictionary will be the string used to describe it in the output dictionary, so use something like search(dict_a=dict_a, dict_b=dict_b).
If your dictionaries might have some of the same keys, this code might not work right, since the keys could collide if they have the same words in their values. You could make the outer dict contain a list of (key, name) tuples, instead of an inner dictionary, I suppose. Just change the assignment line to result.setdefault(word, []).append((key, name)). That would be less handy to search in though.