Welcome folks today in this post we will be comparing two text files line by line using difflib library in python. All the full source code of the application is shown below.

Get Started

In order to get started you need to install the following library using the pip command as shown below

pip install difflib

After installing this library you need to create an app.py file and copy paste the following code

Method 1: Using unified_diff()

app.py

# Importing difflib 
import difflib 

with open('file1.txt') as file_1: 
    file_1_text = file_1.readlines() 

with open('file2.txt') as file_2: 
    file_2_text = file_2.readlines() 

# Find and print the diff: 
for line in difflib.unified_diff( 
        file_1_text, file_2_text, fromfile='file1.txt', 
        tofile='file2.txt', lineterm=''): 
    print(line)

Now just create two text files as shown below and then we will compare it line by line

file1.txt

this is 
the first
file in text1
using python

file2.txt

this is 
the second
file in text2
using python

Now if we execute the python script by typing the below command

python app.py