Crate similar

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This crate implements diffing utilities. It attempts to provide an abstraction interface over different types of diffing algorithms. The design of the library is inspired by pijul’s diff library by Pierre-Étienne Meunier and also inherits the patience diff algorithm from there.

The API of the crate is split into high and low level functionality. Most of what you probably want to use is available top level. Additionally the following sub modules exist:

  • algorithms: This implements the different types of diffing algorithms. It provides both low level access to the algorithms with the minimal trait bounds necessary, as well as a generic interface.
  • udiff: Unified diff functionality.
  • utils: utilities for common diff related operations. This module provides additional diffing functions for working with text diffs.

§Sequence Diffing

If you want to diff sequences generally indexable things you can use the capture_diff and capture_diff_slices functions. They will directly diff an indexable object or slice and return a vector of DiffOp objects.

use similar::{Algorithm, capture_diff_slices};

let a = vec![1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
let b = vec![1, 2, 3, 4, 7];
let ops = capture_diff_slices(Algorithm::Myers, &a, &b);

§Text Diffing

Similar provides helpful utilities for text (and more specifically line) diff operations. The main type you want to work with is TextDiff which uses the underlying diff algorithms to expose a convenient API to work with texts:

use similar::{ChangeTag, TextDiff};

let diff = TextDiff::from_lines(
    "Hello World\nThis is the second line.\nThis is the third.",
    "Hallo Welt\nThis is the second line.\nThis is life.\nMoar and more",
);

for change in diff.iter_all_changes() {
    let sign = match change.tag() {
        ChangeTag::Delete => "-",
        ChangeTag::Insert => "+",
        ChangeTag::Equal => " ",
    };
    print!("{}{}", sign, change);
}

§Trailing Newlines

When working with line diffs (and unified diffs in general) there are two “philosophies” to look at lines. One is to diff lines without their newline character, the other is to diff with the newline character. Typically the latter is done because text files do not have to end in a newline character. As a result there is a difference between foo\n and foo as far as diffs are concerned.

In similar this is handled on the Change or InlineChange level. If a diff was created via TextDiff::from_lines the text diffing system is instructed to check if there are missing newlines encountered (TextDiff::newline_terminated returns true).

In any case the Change object has a convenience method called Change::missing_newline which returns true if the change is missing a trailing newline. Armed with that information the caller knows to handle this by either rendering a virtual newline at that position or to indicate it in different ways. For instance the unified diff code will render the special \ No newline at end of file marker.

§Bytes vs Unicode

Similar module concerns itself with a looser definition of “text” than you would normally see in Rust. While by default it can only operate on str types, by enabling the bytes feature it gains support for byte slices with some caveats.

A lot of text diff functionality assumes that what is being diffed constitutes text, but in the real world it can often be challenging to ensure that this is all valid utf-8. Because of this the crate is built so that most functionality also still works with bytes for as long as they are roughly ASCII compatible.

This means you will be successful in creating a unified diff from latin1 encoded bytes but if you try to do the same with EBCDIC encoded bytes you will only get garbage.

§Ops vs Changes

Because very commonly two compared sequences will largely match this module splits its functionality into two layers:

Changes are encoded as diff operations. These are ranges of the differences by index in the source sequence. Because this can be cumbersome to work with, a separate method DiffOp::iter_changes (and TextDiff::iter_changes when working with text diffs) is provided which expands all the changes on an item by item level encoded in an operation.

As the TextDiff::grouped_ops method can isolate clusters of changes this even works for very long files if paired with this method.

§Deadlines and Performance

For large and very distinct inputs the algorithms as implemented can take a very, very long time to execute. Too long to make sense in practice. To work around this issue all diffing algorithms also provide a version that accepts a deadline which is the point in time as defined by an Instant after which the algorithm should give up. What giving up means depends on the algorithm. For instance due to the recursive, divide and conquer nature of Myer’s diff you will still get a pretty decent diff in many cases when a deadline is reached. Whereas on the other hand the LCS diff is unlikely to give any decent results in such a situation.

The TextDiff type also lets you configure a deadline and/or timeout when performing a text diff.

§Feature Flags

The crate by default does not have any dependencies however for some use cases it’s useful to pull in extra functionality. Likewise you can turn off some functionality.

  • text: this feature is enabled by default and enables the text based diffing types such as TextDiff. If the crate is used without default features it’s removed.
  • unicode: when this feature is enabled the text diffing functionality gains the ability to diff on a grapheme instead of character level. This is particularly useful when working with text containing emojis. This pulls in some relatively complex dependencies for working with the unicode database.
  • bytes: this feature adds support for working with byte slices in text APIs in addition to unicode strings. This pulls in the bstr dependency.
  • inline: this feature gives access to additional functionality of the text diffing to provide inline information about which values changed in a line diff. This currently also enables the unicode feature.
  • serde: this feature enables serialization to some types in this crate. For enums without payload deserialization is then also supported.

Modules§

  • algorithms
    Various diff (longest common subsequence) algorithms.
  • iter
    The various iterators this crate provides.
  • udiff
    This module provides unified diff functionality.
  • utils
    Utilities for common diff related operations.

Structs§

Enums§

  • Algorithm
    An enum representing a diffing algorithm.
  • ChangeTag
    The tag of a change.
  • DiffOp
    Utility enum to capture a diff operation.
  • DiffTag
    The tag of a diff operation.

Traits§

Functions§