A simply newbie question about ndiff

[David Goodger]

Neville Franks wrote:
> I thought that Tim's original ndiff compared files, but the one in difflib
> compares lists of strings. Does this mean I somehow need to read the files
> into lists of strings and then call ndiff.

Yes.  It's easy to turn a file into a list of strings.  Read with
afile.readlines(), or split a multi-line string with astring.splitlines(1)
(the 1 keeps the line endings).

> A short example of how to use
> ndiff to compare two files would be greatly appreciated.

Use the source, Luke!  There are painfully detailed examples in there.

Here's a quickie (untested, but oughta work)::

    import difflib
    list1 = open('file1').readlines()
    list2 = open('file2').readlines()
    diff = difflib.ndiff(list1, list2)
    print ''.join(diff)

-- 
David Goodger  <goodger at users.sourceforge.net>  Open-source projects:
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