HTML::Differences - Reasonably sane HTML diffing

version 0.02

use HTML::Differences qw( html_text_diff );

my $html1 = <<'EOF';
<p>Some text</p>
EOF

my $html2 = <<'EOF';
<p>Some <strong>strong</strong> text</p>
EOF

print html_text_diff( $html1, $html2 );

This module provides a reasonably sane way to get the diff between two HTML documents or fragments. Under the hood, it uses HTML::Parser.

Internally, this module converts the HTML it gets into an array reference containing each unique HTML token. These tokens consists of things such as the doctype declaration, tag start & end, text, etc.

All whitespace between two pieces of text is converted to a single space, except when inside a <pre> block. Leading and trailing space on text is also stripped out.

Start tags are normalized so that attributes appear in sorted order, and all quotes are converted to double quotes, with one space before each attribute. Self-closing tags (like <hr/>) are converted to their simpler form (<hr>).

Note that because HTML::Parser decodes HTML entities inside attribute values, this module cannot distinguish between two attributes where one contains an entity and one does not.

Missing end tags are not added, and will show up in the diff.

Comments are included by default, but you can pass a flag to ignore them.

This module offers two optionally importable subroutines. Nothing is exported by default.

This subroutine uses Text::Diff's diff() subroutine to provide a string version of the diff between the two pieces of HTML provided.

The HTML can be passed as a plain scalar or as a reference to a scalar.

After the two HTML parameters, you can pass key/value pairs as options:

• ignore_comments

  If this is true, then comments are ignored for the purpose of the diff. This defaults to false.

• style

  The style for the diff. This defaults to "Table". See Text::Diff for the available options.

• context

  The amount of context to show in the diff. This defaults to 2**31 to include all the context. You can set this to some smaller value if you prefer.

This returns an array reference of strings suitable for passing to any of Algorithm::Diff's methods or exported subroutines.

The only option currently accepted is ignore_comments.

There are a couple other modules out there that do HTML diffs, so why write this one?

The HTML::Diff module uses regexes to parse HTML. This is crazy.

The Test::HTML::Differences module attempts to fix up the HTML a little too much for my purposes. It ends up ignoring missing end tags or breaking on them in various ways.

Bugs may be submitted through the RT bug tracker (or [email protected]).

I am also usually active on IRC as 'drolsky' on irc://irc.perl.org.

If you'd like to thank me for the work I've done on this module, please consider making a "donation" to me via PayPal. I spend a lot of free time creating free software, and would appreciate any support you'd care to offer.

Please note that I am not suggesting that you must do this in order for me to continue working on this particular software. I will continue to do so, inasmuch as I have in the past, for as long as it interests me.

Similarly, a donation made in this way will probably not make me work on this software much more, unless I get so many donations that I can consider working on free software full time (let's all have a chuckle at that together).

To donate, log into PayPal and send money to [email protected], or use the button at http://www.urth.org/~autarch/fs-donation.html.

Dave Rolsky [email protected]

This software is Copyright (c) 2016 by Dave Rolsky.

This is free software, licensed under:

The Artistic License 2.0 (GPL Compatible)