xml-diff 0.6.0

Example

Comparing these two documents:

<html>
        Here is <b>some bold</b> text.
</html>

and:

<html>
        Here is <i>some italic</i> content that shows how <tt>xml_diff</tt> works.
</html>

Yields:

<documents>
        <html>
                Here is <b>some <del>bold</del></b><del> text</del>.
        </html>
        <html>
                Here is <i>some <ins>italic</ins></i><ins> content that shows how </ins><tt><ins>xml_diff</ins></tt><ins> works</ins>.
        </html>
</documents>

First install the module:

pip install xml_diff

On Ubuntu, apt-get installing python3-lxml or libxml2-dev and libxslt1-dev might be necessary. When installing from source, you’ll need lxml too (but pip will get it for you automatically).

Then call the module from the command line:

python -m xml_diff  --tags del,ins doc1.xml doc2.xml > changes.xml

For really fast comparisons, get Google’s Diff Match Patch library <https://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/>, as re-written and sped-up by @leutloff <https://github.com/leutloff/diff-match-patch-cpp-stl> and then turned into a Python extension module by me <https://github.com/JoshData/diff_match_patch-python>:

pip install diff_match_patch_python

The command-line tool (above) will use this library if it is available.

Use the module from Python like so:

import lxml.etree
from xml_diff import compare

dom1 = lxml.etree.parse("doc1.xml").getroot()
dom2 = lxml.etree.parse("doc2.xml").getroot()
compare(dom1, dom2)

The two DOMs are modified in-place.

If you can’t install diff_match_patch_python, you can also get the pure-Python version of diff_match_patch.py from <https://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/source/browse/trunk/python3/diff_match_patch.py>. (The command-line tool will fall back to this library if it is available.)

Or you can pass in your own comparison library as the third argument. (See xml_diff/__init__.py’s default_differ function for how it would work.)