Similar: A Diffing Library

Similar is a dependency free crate for Rust that implements different diffing algorithms and high level interfaces for it. It was originally inspired by pijul's diff library but has since changed significantly. This library was built for the insta snapshot testing library.

use similar::{ChangeTag, TextDiff};

fn main() {
    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);
    }
}

Screenshot

terminal highlighting

What's in the box?

Myers' diff
Patience diff
Hunt-style diff
Histogram diff
Classic LCS table diff
Diffing on arbitrary comparable sequences
Line, word, character and grapheme level diffing
Text and Byte diffing
Unified diff generation

no_std Support

similar now enables std by default.

For no_std + alloc usage:

[dependencies]
similar = { version = "3", default-features = false }

Backend selection in no_std mode:

default (default-features = false): alloc::collections::BTreeMap
default-features = false, features = ["hashbrown"]: hashbrown::HashMap

insta snapshot testing library
similar-asserts assertion library

License and Links

Found an issue? You can edit this page on GitHub.