Are there any free Xml Diff/Merge tools available? [closed]
Have a look at File comparison tools, from which I am using WinMerge. It has an ability to compare XML documents (you may wish to enable DisplayXMLFiles prefilter for v2.14.0 or PrettifyXML for v2.16.x).
DisplayXMLFiles.dll - This plugin pretty-prints XML files nicely by inserting tabs and line breaks. This is useful for XML files that do not have line returns in convenient locations.
Note for v2.16.x
The plugin PrettifyXML is supplied with the software package. It can be activated as following:
- Make sure that Plugins → Plugin Settings → Enable plugins is enabled.
- Then use either File → Recompare As → Prettify XML or Plugins → Scripts → Prettify XML
For those who wish to play with deprecated DisplayXMLFiles, he needs to download e.g. winmerge-2.16.14-full-src.7z and copy Plugins\dlls\X64\DisplayXMLFiles.dll to WinMerge\MergePlugins\.
See also my feature comparison table.
I wrote and released a Windows application that specifically solves the problem of comparing and merging XML files.
Project: Merge can perform two and three way comparisons and merges of any XML file (where two of the files are considered to be independent revisions of a common base file). You can instruct it to identify elements within the input files by attribute values, or the content of child elements, among other things.
It is fully controllable via the command line and can also generate text reports containing the differences between the files.
There are a few Java-based XML diff and merge tools listed here:
Open Source XML Diff written in Java
Added links:
- diffmk
- VMTools
- OpenSHORE XML Merger
- xxdiff
KDiff3 is not XML specific, but it is free. It does a nice job of comparing and merging text files.
While this is not a GUI tool, my quick tests indicated that diffxml has some promise. The author appears to have thought about the complexities of representing diffs for nested elements in a standardized way (his DUL - Delta Update Language specification).
Installing and running his tools, I can say that the raw text output is quite clear and concise. It doesn't offer the same degree of immediate apprehension as a GUI tool, but given that the output is standardized as DUL, perhaps you would be able to take that and build a tool to generate a visual representation. I'd certainly love to see one.
The author's "links" section does reference a few other XML differencing tools, but as you mentioned in your post, they're all proprietary.