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Hello, is there a free tool for xml files comparison? I need to compare two files to check out is there any differences in the new one.
Is there a tool that will compare two XML files to see if they match? A search found tools that appear to do text comparisons and have the ability to pretty-print the files being compared. I don't want that. I want to know that the two files contain the same elements, that each element contains the same subelements, that each element contains the same attributes, and that each attribute contains the same values.
Have a look at File comparison tools, from which I am using WinMerge. It has an ability to compare XML documents (you may wish to enable DisplayXMLFiles prefilter for v2.14.0 or PrettifyXML for v2.16.x).
DisplayXMLFiles.dll - This plugin pretty-prints XML files nicely by inserting tabs and line breaks. This is useful for XML files that do not have line returns in convenient locations.
Note for v2.16.x
The plugin PrettifyXML is supplied with the software package. It can be activated as following:
- Make sure that Plugins → Plugin Settings → Enable plugins is enabled.
- Then use either File → Recompare As → Prettify XML or Plugins → Scripts → Prettify XML
For those who wish to play with deprecated DisplayXMLFiles, he needs to download e.g. winmerge-2.16.14-full-src.7z and copy Plugins\dlls\X64\DisplayXMLFiles.dll to WinMerge\MergePlugins\.
See also my feature comparison table.
I wrote and released a Windows application that specifically solves the problem of comparing and merging XML files.
Project: Merge can perform two and three way comparisons and merges of any XML file (where two of the files are considered to be independent revisions of a common base file). You can instruct it to identify elements within the input files by attribute values, or the content of child elements, among other things.
It is fully controllable via the command line and can also generate text reports containing the differences between the files.
