CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythoncsvcompare
user1546610
user1546610

Reputation: 185

Compare two csv file content and store the similar into variable

I am really new to python and I have two csv file. The first one (more.csv) has content of

A123,B456,C789

The second one (less.csv) has content of

B456

I want so that when they are the same they store the similar item into a variable called "same"

I figure it would start with something like:

more = open('more.csv','r')
less= open('less.csv','r')
for item in unitid:

Thank you.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 668

Answers (2)

Eric Hulser
Eric Hulser

Reputation: 4022

If they're only one line, you can use the set object (a python built-in) to compare them, for instance:

>>> a = ['A123','B456','C789','D007']
>>> b = ['B456','D007','E009']
>>> c = list(set(a).intersection(b))
>>> print c
['B456', 'D007']

The full method to compare from files would look like:

def compare( fileA, fileB ):
    a_file = open(fileA, 'r')
    a_data = a_file.read()
    a_file.close()

    b_file = open(fileB, 'r')
    b_data = b_file.read()
    b_file.close()

    # compare the contents
    a_set = set(a_data.split(','))
    b_set = set(b_data.split(','))

    return list(a_set.intersection(b_set))

compare('more.csv', 'less.csv')

If they are more than a single line per file, then you'd still be able to use this, you'd just have to modify it a bit - I guess storing the intersections into an array that represents the line-by-line similarities or something.

Upvotes: 2

mVChr
mVChr

Reputation: 50185

Once you process your CSV files into lists you can use collections.Counter to find duplicates:

from collections import Counter

# after processing your CSV files into two lists:
more_list = ['A123', 'B456', 'C789', 'D007']
less_list = ['B456', 'D007', 'E009']

dupe_counter = Counter(more_list)
dupe_counter.update(less_list)
same_list = [val for val in dupe_counter if dupe_counter[val] > 1]
# same_list will be: ['B456', 'D007']

Upvotes: 1

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