cardiff: A Ruby Diffing Library
Cardiff is a diffing library that provides both Ruby-only diffing
and a Ruby C extension that wraps GNU's diff utility.
Ruby-only Diffing
Ruby port of C# code found at [http://www.mathertel.de/Diff/Default.aspx] with minimal changes. There is support for both line by line and character by character diffing.
NOTE: more to come soon.
GNU Diffing (C Extension)
Usage
require 'cardiff/gnu_diff'
include Cardiff
options = {:output_unified => true}
file1 = File.open('./file1.txt')
file2 = File.open('./file2.txt')
status = GNUDiff.diff(file1, file2, options) # outputs to $stdout
# Now both files are closed, and status is 1 if there is a difference and
# 0 if there is no difference, just like the exit status of `diff`.
If you want to diff 2 strings instead of 2 files:
require 'cardiff/gnu_diff'
str1 = "some string"
str2 = "another string"
status = Cardiff::GNUDiff.diff(str1, str2) # outputs to $stdout
To have the output be to a string:
output_str = ''
status = Cardiff::GNUDiff.diff(str1, str2, :output_str => output_str) # outputs to the string, not $stdout
# Also works if `output_str` is a StringIO. NOTE: clears output_str before appending to it.
Options
Coming soon.