Question

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

Answer 1

The low level way:

from __future__ import with_statement with open(filename1) as f1:    with open(filename2) as f2:       if f1.read() == f2.read():          ... 

The high level way:

import filecmp if filecmp.cmp(filename1, filename2, shallow=False):    ...