Introduction ============ dwdiff is a front-end for the diff program that operates at the word level instead of the line level. It is different from wdiff in that it allows the user to specify what should be considered whitespace, and in that it takes an optional list of characters that should be considered delimiters. Delimiters are single characters that are treated as if they are words, even when there is no whitespace separating them from preceding words or delimiters. dwdiff is mostly commandline compatible with wdiff. Only the --autopager, --terminal and --avoid-wraps options are not supported. The default output from dwdiff is the new text, with the deleted and inserted parts annotated with markers. Command line options are available to change both what is printed, and the markers. dwdiff is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3. See the file COPYING for details. Motivation ========== I wrote dwdiff because when diff'ing C code with wdiff, wdiff would often find differences that were larger than I wanted. For example, when one modifies the function header of a program: void someFunction(SomeType var) into void someFunction(SomeOtherType var) wdiff would say that "someFunction(SomeType" was replaced by "someFunction(SomeOtherType", while what I wanted it to say was that "SomeType" was replaced by "SomeOtherType". Prerequisites and installation ============================== dwdiff is a front-end for diff, so the diff utility should be available. The configure script will test for the -a (assume input is text) option. If it is not available (this option is not in the POSIX specifications) a work-around for the -a option is enabled. If a diff command is available that does provide this option but the command has a different name, one can set the diff command to be used by adding --diff=<command> to the configure command-line. dwdiff relies on the GNU gettext library for providing localised messages, and on libicu (http://icu-project.org) for Unicode support. dwdiff can be compiled without support for either of these libraries, which means all messages will be in English and Unicode will not be supported. There are two ways in which to compile dwdiff: Using the configure script: --- $ ./configure or $ ./configure --prefix=/usr (see ./configure --help for more tuning options) $ make all $ make install (assumes working install program) Manually editing the Makefile to suit your computer: --- $ cp Makefile.in Makefile Edit the values for GETTEXTFLAGS, GETTEXTLIBS, LOCALEDIR, DIFF, DIFF_FLAGS, LINGUAS, ICUFLAGS, ICULIBS and prefix $ make all $ make install (assumes working install program) The Makefile.in in the distribution should work on all POSIX compatible make's. I have tested it with both GNU make and BSD make. dwdiff uses several POSIX functions, namely: mkstemp, open, read, lseek, write, close, umask, popen, pclose, snprintf. dwdiff should compile on any Un*x system that provides these functions. Reporting bugs ============== If you think you have found a bug, please check that you are using the latest version of dwdiff [http://os.ghalkes.nl/dwdiff]. When reporting bugs, please include a minimal example that demonstrates the problem. Author ====== Gertjan Halkes <dwdiff@ghalkes.nl> Language files were contributed by the authors named in them.
