We’re all familiar with diff tools like RubyMine, vimdiff, or the good old diff command. These work well for source code but are not optimal for CSVs files, which may have many columns and rows.

I found myself wanting to write CSV-specific diff tool, but I fought that Not Invented Here impulse and Googled first. I found a good Python library called csvdiff.

Imagine we have the following CSV file:

id,name
1,Alan Turing
2,John McCarthy
3,Edger Djikstra

We want to compare it to another file:

id,name
1,Alan Turing
3,Edsger Dijkstra
4,John Von Neumann

We’ve removed, edited, and added a row. The summary option confirms our changes:

$ csvdiff --style=summary id one.csv two.csv
1 rows removed (33.3%)
1 rows added (33.3%)
1 rows changed (33.3%)

The detailed view gives us all the gory details:

$ csvdiff --style=pretty id one.csv two.csv
{
  "_index": [
    "id"
  ],
  "added": [
    {
      "id": "4",
      "name": "Jon Von Neumann"
    }
  ],
  "changed": [
    {
      "fields": {
        "name": {
          "from": "Edger Djikstra",
          "to": "Edsger Dijkstra"
        }
      },
      "key": [
        "3"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "removed": [
    {
      "id": "2",
      "name": "John McCarthy"
    }
  ]
}