How to make a NON-LINE based diff between two strings in Java

Posted by Mycol on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Mycol
Published on 2010-05-19T11:41:57Z Indexed on 2010/05/19 13:30 UTC
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I have to compare the text content of two xml elements, eg.

<p>During lunch he hears strangers whispering, catching the name "Potter" and "Harry", and someone saying You-Know-Who has gone at last. </p>

and

<p>During dinner he hears strangers whispering, catching the name "Rossi" and "Mario", and someone saying You-Know-Who has gone at first. </p>

What I'm looking for is some java libraries to make a diff between the content of paragraphs. All the tools I found makes a line diff. But they're not what I want, simply because i have no lines, but "strings" to compare. What I need is to have a char-based diff: eg. a diff that tells me something like " from the first file, remove char from 8 to 12, add the string "dinner" from char 8."

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