I wanted something similar, but with the ability to specify how the values on duplicate keys were merged, so I hacked this out (notbut did not heavily tested!test it). Obviously this is not a single expression, but it is a single fn.function call.
def merge(d1, d2, merge_fn=lambda x,y:y):
"""
Merges two dictionaries, non-destructively, combining
values on duplicate keys as defined by the optional merge
function. The default behavior replaces the values in d1
with corresponding values in d2. (There is no other generally
applicable merge strategy, but often you'll have homogeneous
types in your dicts, so specifying a merge technique can be
valuable.)
Examples:
>>> d1
{'a': 1, 'c': 3, 'b': 2}
>>> merge(d1, d1)
{'a': 1, 'c': 3, 'b': 2}
>>> merge(d1, d1, lambda x,y: x+y)
{'a': 2, 'c': 6, 'b': 4}
"""
result = dict(d1)
for k,v in d2.iteritems():
if k in result:
result[k] = merge_fn(result[k], v)
else:
result[k] = v
return result