RE: comparing a part of the XML tree

> My situation is as follows: My user selects a subset of the 
> original XML file. After this action I need to compare the 
> selection of the user to the original. Once I find the 
> location of the selection inside the original I have to 
> surround this selection with a new tag, say "<selected>", and 
> "</selected>". I have placed an example of text online at 
> http://www.jborsje.nl/example.txt, so you can see what I mean.
> 
> One way I can think of is iterating over all of the elements 
> of the original, each time calling the "deep-equal()" 
> function, but I do not know if that is the best approach.

It seems you only have access to the content of the data that the user
selected, and no information about where it was selected from. The best
design of course would be one in which you don't lose that information in
the first place.

Calling deep-equal on every element would do the trick. It could potentially
be quite expensive, but with luck deep-equal doesn't take very long when the
arguments are obviously not equal, for example when they are elements with
different names.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/