Compare two different files line by line in python

This solution reads both files in one pass, excludes blank lines, and prints common lines regardless of their position in the file:

with open('some_file_1.txt', 'r') as file1:
    with open('some_file_2.txt', 'r') as file2:
        same = set(file1).intersection(file2)

same.discard('\n')

with open('some_output_file.txt', 'w') as file_out:
    for line in same:
        file_out.write(line)

If you are specifically looking for getting the difference between two files, then this might help:

with open('first_file', 'r') as file1:
    with open('second_file', 'r') as file2:
        difference = set(file1).difference(file2)

difference.discard('\n')

with open('diff.txt', 'w') as file_out:
    for line in difference:
        file_out.write(line)

Yet another example...

from __future__ import print_function #Only for Python2

with open('file1.txt') as f1, open('file2.txt') as f2, open('outfile.txt', 'w') as outfile:
    for line1, line2 in zip(f1, f2):
        if line1 == line2:
            print(line1, end='', file=outfile)

And if you want to eliminate common blank lines, just change the if statement to:

if line1.strip() and line1 == line2:

.strip() removes all leading and trailing whitespace, so if that's all that's on a line, it will become an empty string "", which is considered false.

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Python

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