Say that I have two CSV files (file1 and file2) with contents as shown below: file1: fred,43,Male,"23,45",blue,"1, bedrock avenue" file2: fred,39,Male,"23,45",blue,"1, bedrock avenue" I would like to compare these two CSV records to see if columns 0,2,3,4, and 5 are the same. I don't care about column 1. What's the most pythonic way of doing this? EDIT: Some example code would be appreciated.