Question

Recently with help of stackoverflow i came to know how to match text files using python now im facing some small problem with same code…it performs following task

Input to program is two text files
File 1

C1orf159

FAM79A

IGFBP2

RNF25
.

.

.

.

File 2

ACVR2B

CACNA1A

RNF25

IGF2

.

.

.

I wrote one python script to extract common words between these two files as follows

file1=open("f1.txt","r")
file2=open("f2.txt","r")
file3=open("overlap.txt","w")

list1=file1.readlines()
list2=file2.readlines()

for line1 in list1:
     for line2 in list2:
       if line1.strip() in line2.strip():
          print line2
      file3.write(line2)

this gives result as follows

RNF25

IGF2

.

.

.

But there is a problem in this output second word IGF2 is not there in file1…script is matching IGFBP2 from file1 with IFG2..meaning it is looking for patterns… I dont want this i want exact matches between two files..

Can anybody help to modify my script to get exact matches between two files…

Thanks
Ni

Answer 1

You want line1.strip() == line2.strip(). in in this case will match substrings. You are after exact matches it sounds like.