line_diff

Tool to compare two single lines of text. The intended use case is to compare long lines where parts are different or missing. Example use cases:

• long command lines with many arguments and flags
• Compiler commands with many paths (with potentially different order)
• Long function declarations with slightly different arguments

Features

• Multiple, user specified separators
• Converting all text to lowercase
• Sorting chunks before comparing the chunks
• Different input options: Command line, two files, single file or standard input
• Statistics about the number of chunks and number of characters
• Store preprocessed data into files in order to use external diff tool

Example output

Comparing to different cargo commands with arguments in different order. With line_diff it is easy to spot that the only difference is the --release argument

Line 1: cargo run -- -o --file f1.txt -s ",;"
Line 2:
cargo run --release -- --file f1.txt -s ",;" -o
┌────────┬────────────┬───────────┐
│ Line 1 │ Same │ Line 2 │
├────────┼────────────┼───────────┤
│ │ ",;" │ │
│ │ -- │ │
│ │ --file │ │
├────────┼────────────┼───────────┤
│ │ │ --release │
├────────┼────────────┼───────────┤
│ │ -o │ │
│ │ -s │ │
│ │ cargo │ │
│ │ f1.txt │ │
│ │ run │ │
├────────┼────────────┼───────────┤
│ 37 │ Characters │ 47 │
├────────┼────────────┼───────────┤
│ 8 │ Chunks │ 9 │
└────────┴────────────┴───────────┘

Examples

Compare two lines from two different input files.

line_diff f1.txt f2.txt

Compare two lines from two different input files. With the -o option the chunks will be sorted before comparison. This is handy for cases such as compiler flags where the ordering does not matter.

line_diff f1.txt f2.txt -o

Compare two lines from two a single input file and with sorting of the chunks. Specify two different separators (' ' and ';') with the -s option

line_diff --file f1.txt -o -s ' ' ';'

Compare two lines by specifying the string on the command line

line_diff --line1 "hello world" --line2 "hello there"

Compare two lines, but first convert them both to lowercase

line_diff --line1 "hello world" --line2 "Hello wOrld" -l