def sparsify(d): """Improve dictionary sparsity. The dict.update() method makes space for non-overlapping keys. Giving it a dictionary with 100% overlap will build the same dictionary in the larger space. The resulting dictionary will be no more that 1/3 full. As a result, lookups require less than 1.5 probes on average. Example: >>> import __builtin__ >>> sparsify(__builtin__.__dict__) """ e = d.copy() d.update(e)