xmldiff [ options ] -r original_directoty modified_directory

The implementation is based on Change detection in hierarchically structured information, by S. Chawathe, A. Rajaraman, H. Garcia-Molina and J. Widom, Stanford University, 1996

-h, --help

display this help message and exit.

-V, --version

display version number and exit

-H, --html

input files are HTML instead of XML

-r, --recursive

when comparing directories, recursively compare any subdirectories found.

-x, --xupdate

display output following the Xupdate xml specification (see http://www.xmldb.org/xupdate/xupdate-wd.html#N19b1de).

-e <encoding>, --encoding=<encoding>

specify the encoding to use for output. Default is UTF-8

-n, --not-normalize-spaces

do not normalize spaces and new lines in text and comment nodes.

-c, --exclude-comments

do not process comment nodes

-g, --ext-ges

include all external general (text) entities.

-p, --ext-pes

include all external parameter entities, including the external DTD subset.

--profile=<file>

display an execution profile (run slower with this option), profile saved to file (binarie form).

0 means no difference were found.

A positive number means some differences were found.

A negative number means an error occured.

xmldiff uses an algorithm with a (too) high algorithmical complexity, which makes it unsuitable to process large XML documents. If your document has more than about 100 nodes, you should probably look for an alternative solution.

Any suggestion to this issue is welcome by Logilab. Please tell us if you are aware of a simpler algorithm to solve this problem.