Global Moxie

Photo by Thomas Hawk.

If you're developer looking for an easy way to display differences between two different chunks of text, I highly recommend Neil Fraser's diff-match-patch code library. Neil works for Google, and his library is used in Google Documents... and now Big Medium, too.

The open-source library (LGPL license) is available in Java, JavaScript and Python and makes for a great drop-in to add diff support to your app.

Big Medium uses the JavaScript library to diff text versions, and it reduces the whole operation to just four lines of code:

var dmp = new diff_match_patch();
var d = dmp.diff_main(oldText, newText);
dmp.diff_cleanupSemantic(d);
var html = dmp.diff_prettyHtml(d)

Click to enlarge.

Sweet.

Tags: programming, versioncontrol