How to use cmp() function to compare 2 files?

[yinglcs at gmail.com]

On Feb 26, 10:22 pm, "Dan Bishop" <danb... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Feb 26, 10:09 pm, "ying... at gmail.com" <ying... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hi,
>
> > i have 2 files which are different (1 line difference):
> > $ diff groupresult20070226190027.xml groupresult20070226190027-2.xml
> > 5c5
> > < x:22 y:516 w:740 h:120 area:
> > ---
>
> > > x:22 y:516 w:740 h:1202 area:
>
> > But when I use the cmp() function to compare 2 files, it return "1",
>
> > $ python Python 2.4.3 (#1, Oct 23 2006, 14:19:47)
> > [GCC 4.1.1 20060525 (Red Hat 4.1.1-1)] on linux2
> > Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.>>> cmp("groupresult20070226190027.xml", "groupresult20070226190027-2.xml")
>
> > 1
>
> > Can you please tell me why?
>
> Because '.' > '-' (character 25 of each string).
>
> But this is comparing the filenames, which isn't what you want to do.
>
> > And how can I compare the content of 2
> > files in python?
>
> Use the difflib module.

Thanks, but from here:
http://doc.astro-wise.org/difflib.html
it said it is just for comparing 2 sequence of strings, not files.

How can I use that to compare content of 2 files?