Question

Say that I have two CSV files (file1 and file2) with contents as shown below:

file1:

fred,43,Male,"23,45",blue,"1, bedrock avenue"

file2:

fred,39,Male,"23,45",blue,"1, bedrock avenue"

I would like to compare these two CSV records to see if columns 0,2,3,4, and 5 are the same. I don’t care about column 1.

What’s the most pythonic way of doing this?

EDIT:

Some example code would be appreciated.

EDIT2:

Please note the embedded commas need to be handled correctly.

Answer 1

I suppose the best ways is to use Python library: http://docs.python.org/library/csv.html.

UPDATE (example added):

import csv
reader1 = csv.reader(open('data1.csv', 'rb'), delimiter=',', quotechar='"'))
row1 = reader1.next()
reader2 = csv.reader(open('data2.csv', 'rb'), delimiter=',', quotechar='"'))
row2 = reader2.next()
if (row1[0] == row2[0]) and (row1[2:] == row2[2:]):
    print "eq"
else:
    print "different"