How to merge two arrays of hashes

Question

I have two arrays of hashes:

a = [
  {
    key: 1,
    value: "foo"
  },
  {
    key: 2,
    value: "baz"
  }
]

b = [
  {
    key: 1,
    value: "bar"
  },
  {
    key: 1000,
    value: "something"
  }
]

I want to merge them into one array of hashes, so essentially a + b except I want any duplicated key in b to overwrite those in a. In this case, both a and b contain a key 1 and I want the final result to have b's key value pair.

Here's the expected result:

expected = [
  {
    key: 1,
    value: "bar"
  },
  {
    key: 2,
    value: "baz"
  },
  {
    key: 1000,
    value: "something"
  }
]

I got it to work but I was wondering if there's a less wordy way of doing this:

hash_result = {}
a.each do |item|
  hash_result[item[:key]] = item[:value]
end

b.each do |item|
  hash_result[item[:key]] = item[:value]
end

result = []
hash_result.each do |k,v|
  result << {:key => k, :value => v}
end

puts result

puts expected == result # prints true

Answer 1

uniq would work if you concatenate the arrays in reverse order:

(b + a).uniq { |h| h[:key] }
#=> [
#     {:key=>1, :value=>"bar"},
#     {:key=>1000, :value=>"something"},
#     {:key=>2, :value=>"baz"}
#   ]

It doesn't however preserve the order.