Re: Bug#267598: ITP: xmldiff -- display the differences between XML documents

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 09:31:33AM -0400,
 Dan Weber <dan@mirrorlynx.com> wrote 
 a message of 33 lines which said:

> What makes xmldiff different from diff.

diff operates at the text level. It knows nothing about the syntax.

xmldiff operates at the XML tree level. It displays only significant
differences, not syntaxic variants.

>  Could you show me some output?

Here, two files are identical, XML-speaking:

 % cat empty.xml 
<foobar/>
 % cat empty2.xml
<foobar></foobar>
 % diff empty.xml empty2.xml
1c1
< <foobar/>
---
> <foobar></foobar>
 % xmldiff empty.xml empty2.xml
 % 

Here, they are really different.

 % cat full.xml
<full>
Me<foobar/>
</full>
 % cat full2.xml

<full>Me</full>
 % xmldiff full.xml full2.xml
[remove, /full[1]/foobar[1]]
 %