How to compare files

[Lad]

Hi,
What is the best method for comparing two files by words?
I was thinking about reading files by words and compare them but a word
in one file can be linked with a new line character ( \n)
and this '\n' will cause that the words will considered to be
different( eventhough without '\n' are the same)

Thanks for help.
LAd.

 

[dberlin]

you could always just remove those special characters (\n \t ..),
remove spaces, read both files and compare string. I don't this is the
best way of doing this... but maybe a combination of this way and yours
will be efficient enough - remove all problematic characters and then
compare line by line.

good luck...

 

[Brett g Porter]

Hi,
What is the best method for comparing two files by words?
I was thinking about reading files by words and compare them but a word
in one file can be linked with a new line character ( \n)
and this '\n' will cause that the words will considered to be
different( eventhough without '\n' are the same)

Thanks for help.
LAd.

Have you looked at the difflib module that comes with Python?

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-difflib.html

 

[Terry Hancock]

Hi,
What is the best method for comparing two files by words?
I was thinking about reading files by words and compare them but a word
in one file can be linked with a new line character ( \n)
and this '\n' will cause that the words will considered to be
different( eventhough without '\n' are the same)

Use the split from re instead of the string method, and
include all the non-word characters (including '\n') as
whitespace characters. Then you'll have only words
(I think you can also wind up with empty strings, which
you can strip out pretty easily).

 

[bruno modulix]

Hi,
What is the best method for comparing two files by words?

try the difflib module:
http://www.python.org/doc/2.4.1/lib/module-difflib.html