Re: [xml] doing an xml diff

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 03:31:08PM +0200, Petr Pajas wrote:
> Aamer Akhter <aakhter gmail com> writes:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > This question isn't specific to libxml2:
> >
> > Is there a list/review of XML diff utilities/libraries that anyone is
> > aware of? There seem to bunch out there but they seem to be in a state
> > of disrepair, or provide a huge change set for just simple leaf
> > element node disappearing.
>
> I don't know of such a list. I only may share my personal
> experience. I've tried all Java tools I could find, the single Python
> xmldiff, several Perl modules and the Microsoft xmldiff/patch
> toolkit. Except for the last one, all had their problems and if they
> produced any output on my (largish) files within a reasonable long
> time and resources then the result resulting change set was
> inadequate (some of them even say: remove the whole 1st document and replace
> it with the 2nd one).
>
> On the other hand, I have very good experience with the MS toolkit,
> which is surprisingly provided including source code (although I
> didn't examine the EULA), is written in C# and runs even on Linux
> under Mono both without compilation and Mono-compiled. It seems
> reasonably fast (parses and compares >10Mb files in just a few
> seconds) and the change set also seems adequate and reasonably small.

  I remember seeing an IBM paper published at a web conf a couple
years ago about xml diff, and IIRC they published the code on alphaworks
  http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xmldiffmerge
a small XML diff API would be a nice addition to libxml2 or xmllint
if it's too big to go into libxml2 itself. I remember asking for an
implementation a few years ago, but nobody really got interested in
writing this.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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