After having discovered numerous HTMLDiff Projects out there, I found myself trying 3 or 4 of them out.
They all had particular traits that both fit and didn't fit what I wanted, so I thought I should write about them for others who are looking for good HTMLDiff software.
This posts will be on the the C HTMLDiff code I stumbled on.
Advantages
- Speed: Since it's in C, running this code from PHP (using
shell_exec) is unbelievably fast. Compared with my usage of the the PHP library Visual Diff (moved over to http://gitorious.org/htmldiff), it's not even comparable - Very easy to compile and set up: I wrote in my post Compiling C HTMLDiff program on Ubuntu 12.04 the flow I went through to get it working. Pretty straight forward
Disadvantages
- Too powerful: The diff done by this software diffs everything. This includes Tags, comments, attributes, etc. While I can understand the need for this in some use-cases, for me, I'm only interested in "visual" changes that have gone on
- Not native to PHP: I suppose this could fit in both categories. The reason I'm putting it here, is some people may not be comfortable (or have access to) running C programs through the shell from within PHP. I didn't have a problem with it, but I could understand it not being desirable
It's a solid library, but unfortuantely, not of use to me right now.