23 lines
1.2 KiB
Plaintext
23 lines
1.2 KiB
Plaintext
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Spiff compares the contents of two files and prints a description
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of the important differences between the files. White space is
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ignored except to separate other objects. Spiff maintains tolerances
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below which differences between two floating point numbers are
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ignored. Differences in floating point notation (such as 3.4 3.40
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and 3.4e01) are treated as unimportant. User specified delimited
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strings (i.e. comments) can also be ignored. There are options for
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C and other languages; comments are understood and normally ignored.
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Inside other user specified delimited strings (i.e. quoted strings)
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whitespace can be significant.
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Spiff's operation can be altered via command line options, a command
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script, and with commands that are embedded in the input files.
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Each of two input files is read and stored in core. Then it is
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parsed into a series of tokens (literal strings and floating point
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numbers, white space is ignored). The token sequences are stored
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in core as well. After both files have been parsed, a differencing
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algorithm is applied to the token sequences. The differencing
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algorithm produces an edit script, which is then passed to an output
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routine. The result is much slower than regular diff, but much
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more controllable.
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