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RE: How to compare two DOM Node and XML file?

• To: "Li Yuejiong(John)" <john_li@m...>
• Subject: RE: How to compare two DOM Node and XML file?
• From: Henrik Martensson <henrik.martensson@b...>
• Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 10:59:59 +0200
• Cc: "Baisak, Ranjan" <ranjan_baisak@m...>, XML Developer List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <EDBEE001298F534EBCFEE2C1B4FAC86D6C089C@m...>
• References: <EDBEE001298F534EBCFEE2C1B4FAC86D6C089C@m...>

Hi,

I've had the same problem, and solved it by cheating a bit. Starting
with two DOM trees:

1. Normalize both documents, removing extraneous whitespace, etc.
2. Serialize the documents to strings.
3. Compare string lengths. If they are not equal, the documents
   are not equal.
4. Iterate over the characters in the strings, summing the values
   of the code points.
5. Compare the sums. If they are equal, the documents are (probably)
   equal.

>From an XML viewpoint there are so many things wrong with this approach
that I don't know where to start. For example, a character and the
corresponding character entity won't be considered equal, it is quite
possible to have two different documents that get the same sums, etc.

>From a practical standpoint, when unit testing applications that produce
XML documents, it has worked well so far.

/Henrik Mårtensson

On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 10:41, Li Yuejiong(John) wrote:
> Ranjan,
> 
> I use xmlunit these days and think it's quite good. Now I encounter one
> problem. I find when I compare two XML Document, the result is sensible
> to the sequence of the Node. 
> 
> Is it a bug? Or I miss something?
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Baisak, Ranjan [mailto:ranjan_baisak@m...] 
> Sent: Monday, July 11, 2005 7:27 PM
> To: Li Yuejiong(John); xml-dev@l...
> Subject: RE:  How to compare two DOM Node and XML file?
> 
> Look for xmlunit.sourceforge.net. 
> 
> 
> regards,
> -Ranjan
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Li Yuejiong(John) [mailto:john_li@m...]
> Sent: Monday, July 11, 2005 4:53 PM
> To: xml-dev@l...
> Subject:  How to compare two DOM Node and XML file?
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Is there any Java API to compare two DOM Node equal or not?  
> 
> And is there any Java API to compare two XML file equal or not?
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
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  • RE: How to compare two DOM Node and XML file?
    • From: "Li Yuejiong(John)" <john_li@m...>

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