RE: XML Difference API

[Joseph Kesselman]

The Xalan test suite uses a parse-and-compare tool to check stylesheet results; you could try swiping that code... I *think* that code lives in Xalan's test/java/src/org/apache/qetest/xsl directory.

If you want something more sophisticated than a yes/no answer -- a real equivlent of "diff", which gives you a minimal description of what changed how -- the best I've seen was IBM's old XMLTreeDiff engine, which was made available on http://alphaworks.ibm.com. Unfortunately that relied on some code that got factored out of Xerces and may not have been made available as a standalone package  (eg, the ability to obtain a cryptographic-checksum "signature" for a portion of a DOM tree)... but it's possible that it has been updated since then; worth checking.


______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research