The Lorax is a full diff and patch library for XML/HTML documents, based on Nokogiri.
It can tell you whether two XML/HTML documents are identical, or if they’re not, tell you what’s different. In trivial cases, it can even apply the patch.
It’s based loosely on Gregory Cobena’s master’s thesis paper, which generates deltas in less than O(n * log n) time, accepting some tradeoffs in the size of the delta set. You can find his paper at gregory.cobena.free.fr/www/Publications/thesis.html.
“I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees.”
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Detect differences between documents, or tell whether two documents are the same.
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Generate patches for the differences between documents.
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Apply patches for trivial cases.
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More work needs to be done to make sure patches apply cleanly.
Imagine you have two Nokogiri::XML::Documents. You can tell if they’re identical:
Lorax::Signature.new(doc1.root).signature == Lorax::Signature.new(doc2.root).signature
You can generate a delta set (currently opaque (sorry kids)):
delta_set = Lorax.diff(doc1, doc2)
and apply the delta set as a patch to the original document:
new_doc = delta_set.apply(doc1)
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Nokogiri 1.4.0
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sudo gem install lorax
(The MIT License)
Copyright © 2009-2012 Mike Dalessio
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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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