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.
Answer from dma_k on Stack OverflowHello, 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.
Are there any free Xml Diff/Merge tools available? - Stack Overflow
XML files comparison / diff?
diff - How to compare XML files - Stack Overflow
How can I compare two XML files and assert they are the same, except for an attribute I have chosen to ignore?
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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.
I've got a few XML files that are a couple thousand lines long I need to compare and see which values in file A are missing from file B.
Does anyone have an efficient way to diff these? They're not formatted the same at all, so normal text diff programs won't work. I just need to compare which "<value203>...</value203>" aren't in the one file.
I had a similar problem and I eventually found: http://superuser.com/questions/79920/how-can-i-diff-two-xml-files
That post suggests doing a canonical XML sort then doing a diff. The following should work for you if you are on Linux, Mac, or if you have Windows with something like Cygwin installed:
$ xmllint --c14n FileA.xml > 1.xml
$ xmllint --c14n FileB.xml > 2.xml
$ diff 1.xml 2.xml
For what it's worth, I have created a java tool (or kotlin actually) for effecient and configurable canonicalization of xml files.
It will always:
- Sort nodes and attributes by name.
- Remove namespaces (yes - it could - hypothetically - be a problem).
- Prettyprint the result.
In addition you can tell it to:
- Remove a given list of node names - maybe you do not want to know that the value of a piece of metadata - say
<RequestReceivedTimestamp>has changed. - Sort a given list of collections in the context of the parent - maybe you do not care that the order of
<Contact>entries in<ListOfFavourites>has changed.
It uses XSLT and does all the above efficiently using chaining.
Limitations
It does support sorting nested lists - sorting innermost lists before outer. But it cannot reliably sort arbitrary levels of recursively nested lists.
If you have such needs you can - after having used this tool - compare the sorted byte arrays of the results. they will be equal if only list sorting issues remain.
Where to get it
You can get it here: XMLNormalize