xmlcomp

Compare two XML documents

xmlcomp is an XSLT stylesheet you can run against two XML documents to determine structural and textual content difference.

xmlcomp will only report on elements found in the first input file xml1.xml, but which are either missing or have different content in the second file xml2.xml. In order to find all differences between xml1.xml and xml2.xml, you will need to run xmlcomp.sh twice - once with xml1.xml as the first file argument and then again with xml2.xml as the 1st file and xml1.xml as the 2nd one.

Prerequisites

• xsltproc
• bash

Features

• compare XML element structure
  • Report missing element only
  • Report also element strict position
• Report missing attributes
• Report textual text() differences

Usage

 $ ./xmlcomp.sh
 Usage: ./xmlcomp.sh [-t] [-p ELEMENT-NAME[,..]|*] <xml1> <xml2>

    options:
    -a  compare attributes
    -t  diff element content - otherwise only missing elements will be reported
    -p  comma-separated list of element names which should be
        compared with strict positioning. 
        The default is not to care about the position of 
        a child element under its parent, but either it exists or not. 
        If the value for -p is '*', then all document elements
        will be compared with strict positioning turned on

Examples

Given the following XML files as input:

• original.xml:

  <root>
      <oldname>old</oldname>
      <newname>new</newname>
      <with-attribute attr1="1" missing-attr="2" attr-diff="original text"/>
  
      <array>
          <item>
              <a>a</a>
              <b>b</b>
          </item>
          <item>
              <a>a</a>
              <b>b</b>
          </item>
          <item>
              <a>a</a>
              <b>b</b>
          </item>
      </array>
  </root>

• new.xml:

  <root>
      <newname>new</newname>
      <with-attribute attr1="1" attr-diff="new text"/>
  
      <array>
          <item>
              <a>a</a>
              <b>b</b>
          </item>
          <item>
              <a>a</a>
          </item>
          <item>
              <a>b</a>
              <c>b</c>
          </item>
      </array>
  </root>

---

• compare element structure - ignore element positioning:

    $ ./xmlcomp.sh original.xml new.xml
        error: missing /root/oldname
  

• compare element structure - strict element positioning for item:

    $ ./xmlcomp.sh -p item original.xml new.xml
        error: missing /root/oldname
        error: missing /root/array/item[2]/b
        error: missing /root/array/item[3]/b
  

• compare element structure including attributes:

    $ ./xmlcomp.sh -a original.xml new.xml
        error: missing /root/oldname
        error: missing /root/with-attribute/@missing-attr
  

• compare element structure including strict positioning, attributes and element text:

    $ ./xmlcomp.sh -p item -t -a original.xml new.xml        
        error: missing /root/oldname
        error: missing /root/with-attribute/@missing-attr
        warning: content /root/with-attribute/@attr-diff:
        --- original text
        +++ new text
        error: missing /root/array/item[2]/b
        warning: content /root/array/item[3]/a:
        --- a
        +++ b
        error: missing /root/array/item[3]/b