The textproc/spiff port
spiff-1.0p1 – very flexible diff-like program
Description
Spiff compares the contents of two files and prints a description
of the important differences between the files. White space is
ignored except to separate other objects. Spiff maintains tolerances
below which differences between two floating point numbers are
ignored. Differences in floating point notation (such as 3.4 3.40
and 3.4e01) are treated as unimportant. User specified delimited
strings (i.e. comments) can also be ignored. There are options for
C and other languages; comments are understood and normally ignored.
Inside other user specified delimited strings (i.e. quoted strings)
whitespace can be significant.
Spiff's operation can be altered via command line options, a command
script, and with commands that are embedded in the input files.
Each of two input files is read and stored in core. Then it is
parsed into a series of tokens (literal strings and floating point
numbers, white space is ignored). The token sequences are stored
in core as well. After both files have been parsed, a differencing
algorithm is applied to the token sequences. The differencing
algorithm produces an edit script, which is then passed to an output
routine. The result is much slower than regular diff, but much
more controllable.
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