In Python, is there a concise way of comparing whether the contents of two text files are the same?

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):
   ...