Class Differ

Lib/difflib.py:727–1027

r""" Differ is a class for comparing sequences of lines of text, and producing human-readable differences or deltas. Differ uses SequenceMatcher both to compare sequences of lines, and to compare sequences of characters within similar (near-matching) lines. Each line of a Diffe

class Differ:
    r"""
    Differ is a class for comparing sequences of lines of text, and
    producing human-readable differences or deltas.  Differ uses
    SequenceMatcher both to compare sequences of lines, and to compare
    sequences of characters within similar (near-matching) lines.

    Each line of a Differ delta begins with a two-letter code:

        '- '    line unique to sequence 1
        '+ '    line unique to sequence 2
        '  '    line common to both sequences
        '? '    line not present in either input sequence

    Lines beginning with '? ' attempt to guide the eye to intraline
    differences, and were not present in either input sequence.  These lines
    can be confusing if the sequences contain tab characters.

    Note that Differ makes no claim to produce a *minimal* diff.  To the
    contrary, minimal diffs are often counter-intuitive, because they synch
    up anywhere possible, sometimes accidental matches 100 pages apart.
    Restricting synch points to contiguous matches preserves some notion of
    locality, at the occasional cost of producing a longer diff.

    Example: Comparing two texts.

    First we set up the texts, sequences of individual single-line strings
    ending with newlines (such sequences can also be obtained from the
    `readlines()` method of file-like objects):

    >>> text1 = '''  1. Beautiful is better than ugly.
    ...   2. Explicit is better than implicit.
    ...   3. Simple is better than complex.
    ...   4. Complex is better than complicated.
    ... '''.splitlines(keepends=True)
    >>> len(text1)
    4
    >>> text1[0][-1]
    '\n'
    >>> text2 = '''  1. Beautiful is better than ugly.
    ...   3.   Simple is better than complex.
    ...   4. Complicated is better than complex.
    ...   5. Flat is better than nested.
    ... '''.splitlines(keepends=True)

    Next we instantiate a Differ object:

    >>> d = Differ()

    Note that when instantiating a Differ object we may pass functions to
    filter out line and character 'junk'.  See Differ.__init__ for details.

    Finally, we compare the two:

    >>> result = list(d.compare(text1, text2))

    'result' is a list of strings, so let's pretty-print it: