In Python, is there a concise way of comparing whether the contents of two text files are the same?

Question

I don\'t care what the differences are. I just want to know whether the contents are different.

Answer 1

Since I can't comment on the answers of others I'll write my own.

If you use md5 you definitely must not just md5.update(f.read()) since you'll use too much memory.

def get_file_md5(f, chunk_size=8192):
    h = hashlib.md5()
    while True:
        chunk = f.read(chunk_size)
        if not chunk:
            break
        h.update(chunk)
    return h.hexdigest()

Answer 2

I would use a hash of the file's contents using MD5.

import hashlib

def checksum(f):
    md5 = hashlib.md5()
    md5.update(open(f).read())
    return md5.hexdigest()

def is_contents_same(f1, f2):
    return checksum(f1) == checksum(f2)

if not is_contents_same('foo.txt', 'bar.txt'):
    print 'The contents are not the same!'