What I really want to know is what can I use to diff XML files, semantically?
http://mangrove.cz/diffmark/ (full disclosure: I wrote that), for example...
Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
#12I worked on this problem for just over a decade before moving onto other things. It’s a tough problem to solve. The biggest problem I ran into is that the largest segment of user growth were too fickle. They wanted all kinds of magic in new optional features for their personal preferences that took incredible effort. I lacked the analytics to see who used which exotic features. Most of these people just wanted a beau…
Can you give us a link to your tool?
Re: Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
#13What I really want to know is what can I use to diff XML files, semantically?
I usually c14n them and then diff
Re: Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
#14A good time to also point out https://tekin.co.uk/2020/10/better-git-diff-output-for-ruby-...
Re: Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
#15Couldn't something like this be based on e.g. Sublime's syntax definitions? Then it would work on all languages/formats that had such a definition.
Re: Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
#16To ease the pain in conventional differs, we use a pre-commit hook to format the source code (prettier). This way we only see differences if something _actually_ changed.
This worsens the problem especially in templates when the nesting changes.
Re: Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
#17I worked on this problem for just over a decade before moving onto other things. It’s a tough problem to solve. The biggest problem I ran into is that the largest segment of user growth were too fickle. They wanted all kinds of magic in new optional features for their personal preferences that took incredible effort. I lacked the analytics to see who used which exotic features. Most of these people just wanted a beau…
Can you give us a link to your tool?
The GP’s first submission to HN was a link to a diffing tool, so I assume it’s this: https://prettydiff.com/
Re: Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
#18I wrote diffr [0] for that purpose; it serves me well, especially if your team makes code with long lines.
In my opinion, a simple approach that does NOT make any parsing is more efficient (what about bugs in your parser? code with syntax errors? also, how fast would the parser be?)
Re: Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
#19Gumtree diff is based on ast: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree
There is some discussion of using Treesitter for parsing, that would potentially open door for many languages: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree/issues/148
Re: Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
#20Reminds me of Comby [1]: it's language-agnostic and relies on various brackets to make search-and-replace more structured.
Edit: ah, of course, Comby is referenced in the Readme.
[1]: https://comby.dev/