File Handling and File Comparison In Python

File Handling and File Comparison In Python

In Python, there are several functions as well as libraries that are available for File handling and File comparison. File handling is a crucial part of any web application. In this blog, we will learn how to Compare two files and handle different operations on the file.

File Handling: The key function for working with files in Python is the open() function. The open() function takes two parameters filename, and mode.

Mode: we have different modes like “r” for read, “w” for write, “a” for append and “X” for create.

Syntax:

Suppose we need to read a file then:

file = open(“file_name.extension”, “r”)

Example:

file = open(“file1.txt”, “r”)

print(file.read())

here read is a function used to read the entire file.

Note: it’s a good practice to close your file once your work is done.

Example:

file = open(“file1.txt”, “r”)

print(file.readline())
file.close()

Here close() is used to close the file object. And readline() is a function used to read a file line by line.

So now we know how we can access a file and how we will close a file now we will move to file comparison.

File Comparison:
 

Create a file compare.py and write the below code:

# First Open your files

file1 = open(“file1.txt”, “r”)

file2 = open(“file2.txt”, “r”)

# Write comparison algorithm

for f1, f2 in zip(file1, file2)

      if f1 == f2:

            print(“same---> file1: ”, f1, “ file2:”, f2)

      else:

            print(“Different---> file1: ”, f1, “ file2:”, f2)

# Close File

file1.close()

file2.close()