You can use ndiff in the difflib module to do this. It has all the information necessary to convert one string into another string.
A simple example:
import difflib
cases=[('afrykanerskojęzyczny', 'afrykanerskojęzycznym'),
('afrykanerskojęzyczni', 'nieafrykanerskojęzyczni'),
('afrykanerskojęzycznym', 'afrykanerskojęzyczny'),
('nieafrykanerskojęzyczni', 'afrykanerskojęzyczni'),
('nieafrynerskojęzyczni', 'afrykanerskojzyczni'),
('abcdefg','xac')]
for a,b in cases:
print('{} => {}'.format(a,b))
for i,s in enumerate(difflib.ndiff(a, b)):
if s[0]==' ': continue
elif s[0]=='-':
print(u'Delete "{}" from position {}'.format(s[-1],i))
elif s[0]=='+':
print(u'Add "{}" to position {}'.format(s[-1],i))
print()
prints:
afrykanerskojęzyczny => afrykanerskojęzycznym
Add "m" to position 20
afrykanerskojęzyczni => nieafrykanerskojęzyczni
Add "n" to position 0
Add "i" to position 1
Add "e" to position 2
afrykanerskojęzycznym => afrykanerskojęzyczny
Delete "m" from position 20
nieafrykanerskojęzyczni => afrykanerskojęzyczni
Delete "n" from position 0
Delete "i" from position 1
Delete "e" from position 2
nieafrynerskojęzyczni => afrykanerskojzyczni
Delete "n" from position 0
Delete "i" from position 1
Delete "e" from position 2
Add "k" to position 7
Add "a" to position 8
Delete "ę" from position 16
abcdefg => xac
Add "x" to position 0
Delete "b" from position 2
Delete "d" from position 4
Delete "e" from position 5
Delete "f" from position 6
Delete "g" from position 7
Answer from dawg on Stack OverflowPython
docs.python.org › 3 › library › difflib.html
difflib — Helpers for computing deltas
Each sequence must contain individual single-line strings ending with newlines. Such sequences can be obtained from the readlines() method of file-like objects. The delta generated also consists of newline-terminated strings, ready to be printed ...
Top answer 1 of 7
185
You can use ndiff in the difflib module to do this. It has all the information necessary to convert one string into another string.
A simple example:
import difflib
cases=[('afrykanerskojęzyczny', 'afrykanerskojęzycznym'),
('afrykanerskojęzyczni', 'nieafrykanerskojęzyczni'),
('afrykanerskojęzycznym', 'afrykanerskojęzyczny'),
('nieafrykanerskojęzyczni', 'afrykanerskojęzyczni'),
('nieafrynerskojęzyczni', 'afrykanerskojzyczni'),
('abcdefg','xac')]
for a,b in cases:
print('{} => {}'.format(a,b))
for i,s in enumerate(difflib.ndiff(a, b)):
if s[0]==' ': continue
elif s[0]=='-':
print(u'Delete "{}" from position {}'.format(s[-1],i))
elif s[0]=='+':
print(u'Add "{}" to position {}'.format(s[-1],i))
print()
prints:
afrykanerskojęzyczny => afrykanerskojęzycznym
Add "m" to position 20
afrykanerskojęzyczni => nieafrykanerskojęzyczni
Add "n" to position 0
Add "i" to position 1
Add "e" to position 2
afrykanerskojęzycznym => afrykanerskojęzyczny
Delete "m" from position 20
nieafrykanerskojęzyczni => afrykanerskojęzyczni
Delete "n" from position 0
Delete "i" from position 1
Delete "e" from position 2
nieafrynerskojęzyczni => afrykanerskojzyczni
Delete "n" from position 0
Delete "i" from position 1
Delete "e" from position 2
Add "k" to position 7
Add "a" to position 8
Delete "ę" from position 16
abcdefg => xac
Add "x" to position 0
Delete "b" from position 2
Delete "d" from position 4
Delete "e" from position 5
Delete "f" from position 6
Delete "g" from position 7
2 of 7
58
I like the ndiff answer, but if you want to spit it all into a list of only the changes, you could do something like:
import difflib
case_a = 'afrykbnerskojęzyczny'
case_b = 'afrykanerskojęzycznym'
output_list = [li for li in difflib.ndiff(case_a, case_b) if li[0] != ' ']
output - Python - compare two string by words using difflib and print only difference - Stack Overflow
Python newbie here. I have the following code to compare two strings using difflab library. The output is prefixed with '+','-' for words which are different. How to get only the differences printed More on stackoverflow.com
python: comparing two strings - Stack Overflow
It wasn't my intention to suggest that difflib is less expensive -- it just does a similar, albeit a little different, thing. – Radomir Dopieralski Commented Aug 24, 2010 at 8:37 ... Look for Levenshtein algorithm for comparing strings. Here's a random implementation found via google: http://hetland.org/coding/python... More on stackoverflow.com
Comparing string values in two Pandas DataFrames
Here's a good SO post on how to do fuzzy matching/merging in pandas https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13636848/is-it-possible-to-do-fuzzy-match-merge-with-python-pandas More on reddit.com
A good method for finding any differences between two json files?
So I have 2 json files that I need to compare, and after a certain known event there is an expected difference somewhere in the files, and I'm trying… More on reddit.com
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Compare Strings with Difflib in Python!
Medium
medium.com › @zhangkd5 › a-tutorial-for-difflib-a-powerful-python-standard-library-to-compare-textual-sequences-096d52b4c843
A Tutorial of Difflib — A Powerful Python Standard Library to Compare Textual Sequences | by Kaidong Zhang | Medium
January 27, 2024 - In this case, the difflib Python library might be exactly what you need. It has powerful text comparison functions that can help you quickly find differences and make the integration process easy and enjoyable. ... This library is composed of multiple parts, mainly providing classes and functions for comparing differences between sequences and calculating similarity. It can be used to compare files, strings, etc., and can generate various reports of difference results, so we can intuitively see the differences.
Towards Data Science
towardsdatascience.com › home › latest › side-by-side comparison of strings in python
Side-by-side comparison of strings in Python | Towards Data Science
March 5, 2025 - This default module contains several helpers for comparing sequences, like arrays and strings. All algorithms for comparing sequences is available with a few lines of code. For a brief moment, the idea of implementing my own algorithm crosses my mind, but fades away quickly. The base of the difflib module is the class SequenceMatcher.
GitHub
github.com › dsindex › blog › wiki › [python]-difflib,-show-differences-between-two-strings
[python] difflib, show differences between two strings
April 22, 2015 - def show_diff(text, n_text): """ http://stackoverflow.com/a/788780 Unify operations between two compared strings seqm is a difflib.
Author dsindex
Coderz Column
coderzcolumn.com › tutorials › python › difflib-simple-way-to-find-out-differences-between-sequences-file-contents-using-python
difflib - Simple Way to Find Out Differences Between Sequences / File Contents using Python by Sunny Solanki
August 27, 2022 - As a part of our sixth example, we are again using Differ to explain how we can compare the contents of two files. We have saved our strings from previous examples in files named original.txt and modified.txt. We have then read the contents of both files and compared them using Differ. We can notice from the result that it is exactly the same as the previous example. import difflib a = open("original.txt", "r").readlines() b = open("modified.txt", "r").readlines() difference = difflib.Differ(charjunk=lambda x: x in [",", ".", "-", "'"]) for line in difference.compare(a, b): print(line, end="")
Czarrar
czarrar.github.io › python-diff
Comparing Python Diff Libraries
I’m comparing the performance here between the difflib that’s part of Python and diff_match_patch that’s from Google. I was interested in extracting the word(s) that have been changed between two strings. I started out by using difflib but found that it did weird things with some sequences.
Python Module of the Week
pymotw.com › 2 › difflib
difflib – Compare sequences - Python Module of the Week
While the Differ class shows all of the input lines, a unified diff only includes modified lines and a bit of context. In Python 2.3, the unified_diff() function was added to produce this sort of output: import difflib from difflib_data import * diff = difflib.unified_diff(text1_lines, text2_lines, lineterm='') print '\n'.join(list(diff))
Top answer 1 of 4
23
import difflib
>>> a = 'alex is a buff dude'
>>> b = 'a;exx is a buff dud'
>>> difflib.SequenceMatcher(None, a, b).ratio()
0.89473684210526316
2 of 4
8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance
There are a few libraries on pypi, but be aware that this is expensive, especially for longer strings.
You may also want to check out python's difflib: http://docs.python.org/library/difflib.html
Mark III Systems
markiiisys.com › home › mark iii systems blog › phrase comparison in python
Phrase Comparison in Python - Mark III Systems
May 3, 2021 - One can use the SequenceMatcher function in the difflib python library to do simple string comparisons. This library will take two phrases and output the ratio of characters that match between the two strings.
Miguendes
miguendes.me › python-compare-strings
How to Compare Two Strings in Python (in 8 Easy Ways)
July 2, 2022 - To make it easier to understand, consider a scenario when we have two strings and we are willing to ignore misspelling errors. Unfortunately, that's not possible with the == operator. ... The difflib in the standard library has a SequenceMatcher class that provides a ratio() method that returns a measure of the string's similarity as a percentage.
Tim Santeford
timsanteford.com › posts › creating-a-git-like-diff-viewer-in-python-using-difflib
Creating a Git-Like Diff Viewer in Python Using Difflib - Tim Santeford
January 5, 2025 - Python’s difflib module is a powerful tool that enables this functionality without the need for external libraries. It’s fast, versatile, and integrates seamlessly into scripts or CLI applications. The first step in building a Git-like diff viewer was to identify the core requirements. I wanted to: Compare two strings or pieces of text.
Linux Hint
linuxhint.com › difflib-module-python
Linux Hint – Linux Hint
August 11, 2021 - Linux Hint LLC, [email protected] 1210 Kelly Park Circle, Morgan Hill, CA 95037 Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Beautiful Soup
tedboy.github.io › python_stdlib › generated › difflib.html
difflib — Python Standard Library
Module difflib – helpers for computing deltas between objects. Function get_close_matches(word, possibilities, n=3, cutoff=0.6): Use SequenceMatcher to return list of the best “good enough” matches. ... For two lists of strings, return a delta in context diff format.