.TH XMLDIFF 1 "December 22, 2004" xmldiff "User's Manual"
.SH NAME
xmldiff \- Tree 2 tree correction between xml documents

.SH SYNOPSIS
.B xmldiff [
.I options
.B ]
.I original_file modified_file

.B xmldiff [
.I options
.B ]
.B -r
.I original_directoty modified_directory


.SH DESCRIPTION
.B xmldiff
is a utility for extracting differences between two xml files.  It
returns a set of primitives to apply on source tree to obtain the
destination tree.

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

.SH OPTIONS

.IP "-h, --help"
     display this help message and exit.
.IP "-V, --version"
     display version number and exit
.IP "-H, --html"
     input files are HTML instead of XML
.IP "-r, --recursive"
     when comparing directories, recursively compare any
     subdirectories found.
.IP "-x, --xupdate"
     display output following the Xupdate xml specification
     (see http://www.xmldb.org/xupdate/xupdate-wd.html#N19b1de).
.IP "-e <encoding>, --encoding=<encoding>"
     specify the encoding to use for output. Default is UTF-8
.IP "-n, --not-normalize-spaces"
     do not normalize spaces and new lines in text and comment nodes.
.IP "-c, --exclude-comments"
     do not process comment nodes
.IP "-g, --ext-ges"
     include all external general (text) entities.
.IP "-p, --ext-pes"
     include all external parameter entities, including the external DTD
     subset.
.IP "--profile=<file>"
     display an execution profile (run slower with this option),
     profile saved to file (binarie form).

.SH EXIT STATUS

  0 means no difference were found.

  A positive number means some differences were found.

  A negative number means an error occured.

.SH KNOWN PROBLEMS

.B 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.


.SH REQUIRES
python, pyxml

.SH "SEE ALSO"
.B xmlrev(1)

.I http://www.logilab.org/project/xmldiff/

.I http://www.xmldb.org/xupdate/xupdate-wd.html#N19b1de

.SH AUTHOR
Sylvain Thénault <sylvain.thenault@logilab.fr>

This manpage was written by Alexandre Fayolle <alexandre.fayolle@logilab.fr>.