Merging and sorting log files in Python

Question

I am completely new to python and I have a serious problem which I cannot solve.

I have a few log files with identical structure:

[timestamp] [level]         


        

Answer 1

Read the lines of both files into a list (they will now be merged), provide a user defined compare function which converts timestamp to seconds since epoch, call sort with the user defined compare, write lines to merged file...

def compare_func():
    # comparison code
    pass


lst = []

for line in open("file_1.log", "r"):
   lst.append(line)

for line in open("file_2.log", "r"):
   lst.append(line)

# create compare function from timestamp to epoch called compare_func

lst.sort(cmp=compare_func)  # this could be a lambda if it is simple enough

something like that should do it