Comparing two pandas dataframes for differences

Question

I\'ve got a script updating 5-10 columns worth of data , but sometimes the start csv will be identical to the end csv so instead of writing an identical csvfile I want it to

Answer 1

Not sure if this is helpful or not, but I whipped together this quick python method for returning just the differences between two dataframes that both have the same columns and shape.

def get_different_rows(source_df, new_df):
    """Returns just the rows from the new dataframe that differ from the source dataframe"""
    merged_df = source_df.merge(new_df, indicator=True, how='outer')
    changed_rows_df = merged_df[merged_df['_merge'] == 'right_only']
    return changed_rows_df.drop('_merge', axis=1)