Is it possible to do word by word comparison? about google-diff-match-patch HOT 8 CLOSED

Word-by-word diffing is not a native function of this library.  However, it is 
easy 
to do.  You need to break your text into words (how you define a word is a more 
interesting problem than you might think), create a lookup table of Unicode 
characters to words, build two strings made up of the Unicode characters 
associated 
with each word, Diff those two strings, then convert the diff back into the 
text.

Sounds complicated, but it's not -- because the code has already been written 
for 
you.  Just look at the diff_linesToChars and diff_charsToLines functions.  Copy 
them 
and make them split on words instead of characters.  Then your code will just 
be:

  Object b[] = diff_wordsToChars(text1, text2);
  String wordText1 = (String) b[0];
  String wordText2 = (String) b[1];
  wordarray = (ArrayList<String>) b[2];
  LinkedList<Diff> diffs = diff_main(wordText1, wordText2, false);
  diff_charsToWords(diffs, wordarray);

Have fun defining what a "word" is.  Been there, done that on another project.  
:)

Thanks for your input Neil. I will try that.

I need this enhancement too:)

I implemented the word-by-word (yes, is was easy), and it does a pretty good 
job just
tokenizing spaces and newlines.
Something like:
  wordEndSpace = text.indexOf(' ', wordStart);
  wordEndNewline = text.indexOf('\n', wordStart);
  wordEnd = Math.min(wordEndSpace, wordEndNewline);    
That will do the trick effectively. You could of course do an nicer array 
version, if
you have more matches (punctuation etc). Or perhaps regexp as well.
I guess the reason the simple version works well for me, is that the text is
preprocessed (from HTML) is a rather cool way, so whitespace in the text 
matches HTML
rendering quite close.

Thanks for a great little piece of code, Niel.

Regards,
Mads Buus Westmark

I need this feature also.

[deleted comment]

[deleted comment]

hi,
diff_linesToChars  functions having LinesToCharsResult as a return type. 
Is there any changes required for diff_wordsToChars() ?

 Object b[] = diff_wordsToChars(text1, text2);
  String wordText1 = (String) b[0];
  String wordText2 = (String) b[1];
  wordarray = (ArrayList<String>) b[2];
  LinkedList<Diff> diffs = diff_main(wordText1, wordText2, false);
  diff_charsToWords(diffs, wordarray);

Using the diff-match-path class,we can get the character comparison not a word 
comparison. what are all the changes required for the Word comparison?

Thanks for advance