The utilities find the difference between two XML files and support merging a baseline with a difference file.

The motivation is that ordinary line difference programs are not suitable for XML. In XML, order of attributes is always insignificant while an ordinary diff program would show changed order as a difference. In XML, element order is significant for a sequence but not for other uses. The utilities work on any XML files; they are not XML-schema aware. Element order is handled by a switch; it can either be considered significant or insignificant.

These utilities make use of a difference format conformant to standard "An Extensible Markup Language (XML) Patch Operations Framework Utilizing XML Path Language (XPath) Selectors", IETF RFC 5261. Another benefit of these utilities, aside from editing Orchestra files, is that they can be used for HTTP PATCH operations with XML payloads.

The patch format has no way to show moves. If element order is considered, then a move will be displayed as an add and remove.

The XmlDiff utility compares two XML files and generates a third file that represents their differences in RFC 5261 format. Differences are encoded as additions, replacements, or removals of XML elements and attributes.

To run the difference utility, run this command line:

java io.fixprotocol.xml.XmlDiff <in-file1> <in-file2> [output-file]

If the output file is not provided, then results go to the console.

The XmlMerge utility takes a base XML file and a difference file and merges the two to produce an new XML file.

To run the merge utility, run this command line:

java io.fixprotocol.xml.XmlMerge <base-xml-file> <diff-file> <output-xml-file>

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