libxmldiff

libxmldiff aims at providing efficient diff on XML files (C library)

Features are :

• Detection of modified items, added items, removed items
• Not sensitive to item position changes (based on a id).
• Designed to support large XML files (about 100 Mo). For larger files, treat these files with XML Pre Diff Tool would be a good idea.
• Basic XML manipulation (XSLT, Deletion,...)
• Scripting abilities
• Simple to use

Homepage : http://www.lprp.fr/soft/xml/libxmldiff/libxmldiff_en.php3

libxmldiff comes with a command line xmldiff exposing all the features.

If you are searching for a GUI, please take a look at xmlTreeNav (https://github.com/rpeyron/xmltreenav)

Install

See prebuilt binary packages in release tab for Windows.

PPA repository for Ubuntu : ppa:rpeyron/ppa

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:rpeyron/ppa

Other OSes should build the package (see below).

Build instructions

Dependancies

libxmldiff depends on :

• libxml2 (http://xmlsoft.org/)

Linux build

libxmldiff is a standard autotools project :

./configure
make

If you get some problems, a bootstrap file is provided to rebuild all autotools.

You may install dependancies on debian systems by :

# Build dependancies
sudo apt-get install pkg-config libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autotools-dev automake autoconf
# Run dependancies
sudo apt-get install libc6 libxml2 libxslt1.1 

Windows build

With Visual Studio

Windows Build is done with Visual Studio Community Edition. Please use the latest version in build/ (older vc version are not maintained)

With vscode and msys2

To build with msys2/mingw64:

msys2 -mingw64
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-autotools
pacman -S mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-libxml2 mingw-w64-x86_64-libxslt
./configure
make
make install

Note: the build with msys2 won't be statically linked, so if you want to use it outside the msys2 environment, you will need to collect the required DLL to identify with:

ldd src/xmldiff.exe | grep mingw

Developer Documentation

A developer documentation is available on the github pages

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. You may use GitHub issues tracker for issues, or GitHub Pull Requests.

xmldiff command line help

xmldiff v0.2.8pre - (c) 2004 - Remi Peyronnet - http://people.via.ecp.fr/~remi/
xmldiff - diff two XML files. (c) 2004-2006 - Rémi Peyronnet
Syntax : xmldiff action [options] <parameters>

Actions
 - diff <before.xml> <after.xml> <output.xml>
 - merge <before.xml> <after.xml> <output.xml>
 - xslt <style.xsl> <input.xml> <output.xml> [param='value']
 - recalc <before.xml> <after.xml>
 - execute <script.xds> (xds = list of these commands)
 - load <filename> <alias>
 - save <filename> <alias>
 - close <alias> / discard <alias> (same as close without saving)
 - flush
 - options
 - print <string>
 - delete <from alias> <xpath expression>
 - dup(licate) <source alias> <dest alias>
 - rem(ark),#,--,;,// <remark>
 - print_configuration
 - ret(urn) <value>

Global Options : 
  --auto-save yes      : Automatically save modified files
  --force-clean no     : Force remove of blank nodes and trim spaces
  --no-blanks yes      : Remove all blank spaces
  --pretty-print yes   : Output using pretty print writer
  --optimize no        : Optimize diff algorithm to reduce memory (see doc)
  --use-exslt no       : Allow the use of exslt.org extended functions.
  --savewithxslt yes   : Save with <xsl:output> options the results of XSLT.
  --verbose 4          : Verbose level, from 0 (nothing) to 9 (everything).

Diff Options : 
  --ids '@id,@value'   : Use these item to identify a node
  --ignore '@ignore,..': Ignore differences on these items
  --diff-only no       : Do not alter files, just compare.
  --keep-diff-only no  : Keep only different nodes.
  --before-values yes  : Add before values in attributes or text nodes
  --sep |              : Use this as the separator
  --encoding none  : Force encoding
  --tag-childs yes     : Tag Added or Removed childs
  --merge-ns yes       : Create missing namespace on top of document
  --diff-ns http://... : Namespace definition, use no to disable
  --diff-xmlns diff    : Alias to use, use no to disable
  --diff-attr status   : Name of attribute to use (should not be used in docs)

xmldiff output example

Output is a merge of the two files, with a status indicating if the node is modified, added, removed, or if a child is modified (please notice the diff:status attribute). A identifier can be used to compare similar items. If none is provided, comparison is done on identical nodes names by the order of appearance.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" standalone="yes"?>
<tests xmlns:diff="http://www.via.ecp.fr/~remi/soft/xml/xmldiff" diff:status="below">
  <test name="Inchangé" />
  <test name="Element supprimé" diff:status="below">
    <element id="5" diff:status="removed"/>
  </test>
  <test name="Element ajouté sans ordre" diff:status="below">
    <element diff:status="modified">3|2</element>
    <element diff:status="modified">4|3</element>
    <element diff:status="modified">5|4</element>
    <element diff:status="added">5</element>
  </test>
  <test name="Modification de texte" diff:status="modified">Texte avant|Texte après</test>
</tests>