XML Diff Tool for unordered comparison of 2 XMLs

Question

I am looking for a diff tool that allows me to compare 2 xml (or json) files ignoring the order of its elements.

Example:

<Node>
    <Child name="Alpha"/>
    <Child name="Beta"/>
    <Child name="Charlie"/>
</Node>

<Node>
    <Child name="Beta"/>
    <Child name="Charlie"/>
    <Child name="Alpha2"/>
</Node>

The 2 Node elements should be considered similar and the only difference to be shown is that Node1 has a child name "Alpha" which is "Alpha2" in the other node.

StackOverflow has a similar question, but it was asked 8 years ago, the solution no longer works. Is there a newer tool available?

Have a look at the Altova suite. They are an amazing XML tool — David Brossard, Mar 05 '18 at 05:17
I can build my own diff tool. Do you have any specific algorithm in mind? — sidd607, Mar 05 '18 at 05:48
You have to come up with your own algorithm. But for instance, assume JAXB gives you Java objects, you could determine that 2 sets are equal if they contain the same elements regardless of the order — David Brossard, Mar 05 '18 at 17:47

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 14 '18 at 20:47

Depending on the size of XML use a diff tool with an adjustable skew tolerance - how far the algorithm would look for "similar" lines - and closeness matching.

"Naive" diff using Beyond Compare 4:

With closeness matching:

This works very well when merging, say, Visual Studio *.sln files (XML) with thousands of lines :)

If that's not enough, there's an option for "XML Sort" conversion that applies a sorting XSLT to inputs.

Regular diff:

With "XML Sort" conversion:

Where to apply it from:

is there any algorithm that does this? – sidd607 Dec 17 '18 at 05:00 — sidd607, Dec 17 '18 at 05:00

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 19 '18 at 01:43

0

Notepad++ has a compare plugin.

answered Mar 19 '18 at 01:43

Richard

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 23 '20 at 12:49

I have written an xml compare algorithm using xslt 1.0 which is here. You just need to modify the "file2" variable to compare the input xml file against.

https://github.com/sflynn1812/xslt-diff-turbo

It outputs results of mismatched branch and leaf nodes, and speed is based off of the amount of differences that should generally be expected. More differences then more slowness.

XML Diff Tool for unordered comparison of 2 XMLs

3 Answers3