Introduction

Depuis<<:>> 5.1.16 The diff text widget analyses the differences between a pair of source and destination text strings and displays the results as highlighted insertions and deletions (similar to the "track changes" function of a word processor).

<$diff-text source="This is the original text" dest="This is the text to compare to" mode="words>
    These are the <<diff-count>> differences:
</$diff-text>

Content and Attributes

The content of the $diff-text widget is displayed immediately before the differences. Within the content, the variable diff-count is available, containing the number of differences found. If the widget has no content then it automatically transcludes the tiddler $:/language/Diffs/CountMessage.

Note

The algorithm counts changes as both insertion and deletion, and therefore the number of differences can be higher than expected.

cleanup / editcost

The cleanup attribute determines which optional post-processing should be applied to the diffs:

• none: No cleanup is performed
• semantic (default): Optimizes the differences for readability
• efficiency: Optimizes the differences to minimise the number of operations for subsequent processing
  • When using efficiency mode, the editcost parameter controls the cost threshold for the cleanup algorithm, determining how aggressively the diff algorithm merges nearby edits for better human readability (default value is 4).

Note

Note that in many cases the results will be the same regardless of the cleanup option. See the docs of the underlying library for more details

mode

The mode attribute determines how differences are computed and displayed:

• chars: Compares differences at the character level for precise change detection
• words: Compares differences at the word level for more readable text comparisons
• lines: Compares differences at the line level for better visibility of structural changes

Examples

A basic example:

The quslick brown fox jumleaps

e.g.

The quslick brown fox jumleaps

In words mode, differences are computed at the words level:

The quick slick brown fox jumpsleaps

e.g.

The quick slick brown fox jumpsleaps

To see the effects of all parameters, use this example:

This is a test tiddler is called SampleTiddlerFirstSecond.↩︎
It is used in [[DiffTextWidget]].↩︎
You can modifyedit its content.

mode

chars words lines

cleanup

none semantic efficiency

editcost: 4