R: Indicate differences between two XML documents

compareXMLDocs {XML} | R Documentation

## Indicate differences between two XML documents

### Description

This function is an attempt to provide some assistance in determining if two XML documents are the same and if not, how they differ. Rather than comparing the tree structure, this function compares the frequency distributions of the names of the node. It omits position, attributes, simple content from the comparison. Those are left to the functions that have more contextual information to compare two documents.

### Usage

    compareXMLDocs(a, b, ...)

### Arguments

`a,b` | two parsed XML documents that must be internal documents, i.e. created with `xmlParse` or created with `newXMLNode`.
`...` | additional parameters that are passed on to the `summary` method for an internal document.

### Value

A list with elements

`inA` | the names and counts of the XML elements that only appear in the first document
`inB` | the names and counts of the XML elements that only appear in the second document
`countDiffs` | a vector giving the difference in number of nodes with a particular name.

These give a description of what is missing from one document relative to the other.

### Author(s)

Duncan Temple Lang

### See Also

`getNodeSet`

### Examples

    tt =
     '<x>
         <a>text</a>
         <b foo="1"/>
         <c bar="me">
            <d>a phrase</d>
         </c>
      </x>'

      a = xmlParse(tt, asText = TRUE)
      b = xmlParse(tt, asText = TRUE)
      d = getNodeSet(b, "//d")[[1]]
      xmlName(d) = "bob"
      addSibling(xmlParent(d), newXMLNode("c"))

      compareXMLDocs(a, b)

[Package XML version 3.99-0.3 Index]