What is the best Diff library in Ruby? [duplicate]

Question

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• diff a ruby string or array 12 answers

I've looked at diff-lcs ( http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/diff-lcs ) but it's poorly documented, and appears to be unmaintained.

Are there any good, actively maintained ruby gems for diffing text or html files?

Answer 1

I looked around and couldn't find an existing gem or library that offered a convenient way to generate diff style output from ruby.

I just released diffy which does what I want. It's a lightweight wrapper around diff which lets you generate text or html diffs from two strings, without a lot of fuss. I hope others find it useful. It's in use on wiff.me for anyone wants to preview the html output.

Answer 2

I did some very recent searching and discovered that diff-lcs is an actively supported library again. It is now hosted at halostatue/diff-lcs on GitHub. The recent activity seems to be because one of the authors of Grit, the object-oriented git library for Ruby, added it as a dependency. Grit runs gollom, the GitHub wiki system. If GitHub is a supporter of the library then it's probably safe to say that diff-lcs will remain active for a long time.

Answer 3

I don't know about "good"ness, but some places you might go for more information include:

SO search for "ruby diff"

• diff a ruby string or array
• Diff two XML doc in Ruby?
• how do i compare 2 html pages, and output only the different bits in ruby or PHP?

Google search for "ruby diff"

• http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/168365
• http://www.freshports.org/textproc/ruby-diff/