Is there any utility / code that will return a file containing the *content* differences in two HTML

[balma]

Hi
I needed to know if there is a code that will return the textual
differences in two HTML pages.
Am curious to know what kind of algorithm does that require
I do have an HTML parser library with me - but don't have an idea on
what kind of algorithm to utilise
Thanks for any suggestions

 

[Marco Schmidt]

balma:

I needed to know if there is a code that will return the textual
differences in two HTML pages.
Am curious to know what kind of algorithm does that require
I do have an HTML parser library with me - but don't have an idea on
what kind of algorithm to utilise

You'll have to throw away the markup and then normalize the texts,
replacing all sequences of whitespace characters with a single space
character - if that doesn't get into the way of the comparison. Maybe
you _do_ care about whitespace.

There is diff, a tool that determines the differences between two
texts. IIRC there is a Java implementation of diff.

Do you need all differences, or some percentage value of similarity,
or a simple decision "texts are equal" / "texts are not equal"?

Regards,
Marco