If you are not fundamentally opposed to Java, see http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/tech/xmltreediff from which I obtained the following text : XML TreeDiff is a package of beans that provide the ability to efficiently differentiate and update DOM trees, just like diff and patch differentiate and update data files. XMLTreeDiff is a set of Java beans designed to perform fast differentiation and update of DOM structures. XMLTreeDiff works in many ways like diff and patch. However, rather than differentiating the file representations of the documents (that is, the XML files), XMLTreeDiff runs directly on the DOM's themselves. This way, the differences are directly expressed in terms of native tree operations like change node, delete node or insert node, rather than line mismatches. The advantages of this approach are several: it avoids the need to convert the DOM trees to file format prior to comparing them; with that, it eliminates the 'false negative' reports caused by dissimilar file representations of equivalent DOM structures; finally it avoids the need to infer the tree structural meaning of a line difference report. It is well known that the process of differentiating two labeled tree structures is an expensive one, with a cost (for ordered trees) at least quadratic in the number of tree nodes. This has traditionally held developers back from using direct tree to tree comparison tools. XMLTreeDiff uses an optimal tree differentiating algorithm together with a fast subtree matching procedure to make direct tree differentiation a practical tool. XMLTreeDiff is particularly well suited to do version management of XML documents and tree structured data in general. XMLTreeDiff is packaged as a set of Java beans, and allows both command line and programming access to the differentiation and updated tools. It includes a differentiating tool, and update tool, and a graphical user interface to display the differences directly on the compared trees. Difference reports are output in XML format as well. Anthony Baxter wrote:

It seems to me that it would be a Cool Thing to be able to take two Zope XML export files, say from different days, and feed it into something that would read the two, and produce a "change file" which specifies what has changed (think "diff" for XML).

This would be useful for

ZClass based packages, and making new versions of same. Tracking what's done on a site on a day-by-day basis (something that would produce a list at the end of the day showing exactly what changed, and where).

Just doing a diff of the XML files is one extraordinarily yucky way to do this, but it's not exactly easy to then reapply that as a patch. Something that walked through the files would be more useful...

thoughts? A little bird told me that people are already considering something for this task... any ideas?

would the XML folks have already put something like this together?

Anthony

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