Diff tool to align shuffled lines

Posted by Ken Bloom on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ken Bloom
Published on 2010-03-17T02:23:16Z Indexed on 2010/03/17 2:31 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 507

Filed under:

diff

|

textfiles

Suppose I have two documents that are identical except the lines are shuffled. Is there a tool that can show me which lines in document A correspond to which lines on document B by drawing lines to connect them (kinda like Cairo does for machine translation word alignments)?

What if the files have some level of differing lines (I don't want to figure out which lines are similar to each other -- if there isn't an exact match for a line, then that line has no match.)

Note: I am not looking to sort the files and compare them, rather I am looking to get a visualization of how far out of order the files are relative to each other, and which particular regions tend to move together, and which tend to be shuffled.

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about diff

newline-ignoring diff / diff across multiple lines / reflow-ignoring diff

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Does anybody know of a diff-like tool that can show me the changes between two text files, but ignore changes in whitespace including newlines? Here's an example: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy bear. the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy bear. the quick brown fox jumped over the… >>> More
Unix diff to only print relevant diff

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have these two files File:11 11 12345 File:22 123 456 Output of diff 11 22 2c2 < 456123 --- > 789 Output to be < 456123 > 789 I want it to not print 2c2 and "--" line. I looked at the man page but could not locate any help. Any ideas? The file has more than 1K lines >>> More
How to make meld prefer an SVN diff over a CVS diff

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
We have some directories that are tracked in both CVS and SVN (loooong story). When I change a file in one of these and run meld it diffs it against the SVN version. However for some of the other developers it diffs against CVS. Is there a way to specify which one gets priority? Everyone is using… >>> More
Is there a JS diff library against htmlstring just like google-diff-match-patch on plain text?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Currently I am using google-diff-match-patch to implement a real-time editing tool, which can synchronize texts between multiple users. Everything works great when operations are only plain texts, each user's operation(add/delete texts) could be diff-ed out by comparing to old text snapshot with the… >>> More
Paragraph-based diff program?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Does anyone know of a diff viewer or comparison program that can do paragraph-based differentials? My repos has a large number of LaTeX files that are formatted into 80-character wide paragraphs (for easy editing with vim). It's currently very difficult to interpret the diffs between various versions… >>> More

Related posts about textfiles

What is the fastest way to unzip textfiles in Matlab during a function?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hello all, I would like to scan text of textfiles in Matlab with the textscan function. Before I can open the textfile with fid = fopen('C:\path'), I need to unzip the files first. The files have the extension: *.gz There are thousands of files which I need to analyze and high performance is important… >>> More
List - Strings - Textfiles

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I've got a few questions concerning text files,list and strings. I wonder if it is possible to put in a code which reads the text in a textfile,and then using "string line;" or something else to define each new row of the text and turn all of them into one list. So I can sort the rows, remove a row… >>> More
Unable to view data in notepad.

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have a java code that reads an excel file and writes it to a text file. When i get the output text file, I can see only symbols like this in the notepad. "????????????????????????????" But if i open the text file in wordpad or ms-word, the data is correctly displayed. What could be the error? >>> More
Free WinMerge alternative with more clear line comparison

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I use WinMerge to compare text files, usually alogn with TortoiseSVN. It is pretty good. The only thing which is inconvenient for me is very rough line comparison. For instance, if I have two long lines without spaces and the only symbol is different in two string, WinMerge colors these two lines… >>> More
Create Text File Without BOM

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi guys, I tried this aproach without any success the code I'm using: // File name String filename = String.Format("{0:ddMMyyHHmm}", dtFileCreated); String filePath = Path.Combine(Server.MapPath("App_Data"), filename + ".txt"); // Process ProcessPBS pbs = new ProcessPBS(); pbs… >>> More