Introduction

Introduced in v5.1.16 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.

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).

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:

<$diff-text source="The quick brown fox jumps" dest="The slick brown fox leaps"/>

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

<$diff-text mode="words" source="The quick brown fox jumps" dest="The slick brown fox leaps"/>

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