Show HN: Wordif.sh – word-by-word text comparison in color, output to HTML/PDF

by robtoscani • 4 months ago

5 4 4 months ago

robtoscani3• 4 months ago

'wordif.sh' is a wrapper script around the UNIX diff() utility.

It performs word-by-word comparison of one or multiple pair(s) of plain-text-files, in very much the same way as the UNIX wdiff() utility. Results are stored as color-marked difference-files in HTML-format, or in PDF-format if option -p is given.

A difference-file is a unification of the two input text-files, preserving original text sequence. Text present in both files is printed in black. (Groups of) words locally missing in one of the two files are color-marked as follows:

- bolt red text is present in the 1st file, and not present (there) in the 2nd file; - bolt green text is present in the 2nd file and not present (there) in the 1st file;

With option -d, wordif.sh acts on two directories instead of two text-files. It then compares each text-file in the 2nd directory to its associated text-file in the 1st directory. The resulting difference-files are collected in a difference-directory.

To correctly associate two files in either directory to each other, their respective file names must start with same unique number, followed by an underscore.

wordif.sh has been written by Rob Toscani (rob_toscani@yahoo.com). If you find any bugs or want to comment otherwise, please let me know.

zzleeper• 4 months ago

Found it interesting but would have been easier to see an example of how the html looks in the github page!

robtoscani3• 4 months ago

Good point. I'll add something on the github page showing the html result, thanks for the suggestion!

robtoscani3• 4 months ago

I've just added a simple example on the github page of how the resulting difference-file looks in an html-browser, I hope this helps to get a better idea.

Show HN: Wordif.sh – word-by-word text comparison in color, output to HTML/PDF

Related Stories