Is there any diff tool for XML files?

Question

Are there any good (Linux) tools for diffing two XML files?

Ideally, I would like to be able configure it to some things strict, or loosen some things, like whitespace, or attribute order. I'll often care that the files are functionally the same, but diff by itself, would be annoying to use, especially if the XML file doesn't have a lot of linebreaks. For example, the following should really be okay to me:

<tag att1="one" att2="two">
  content
</tag>

<tag att2="two" att1="one">
  content
</tag>

Answer 1

One approach would be to first turn both XML files into Canonical XML, and compare the results using diff. For example, xmllint can be used to canonicalize XML.

$ xmllint --c14n one.xml > 1.xml
$ xmllint --c14n two.xml > 2.xml
$ diff 1.xml 2.xml

Answer 2

Diffxml gets the basic functionality correct, though it doesn't seem to offer many options for configuration.

Answer 3

I use Beyond Compare to compare all types of text based files. They produce versions for Windows and Linux.

Answer 4

No experience with these, just expanding the list:

• Kompare
• Meld
• KDiff3

Answer 5

SD Smart Differencer compares documents based on structure as opposed to actual layout.

There's an XML Smart Differencer. For XML, that means matching order of tags and content. It should note that the text string in the specific fragment you indicated was different. It presently doesn't understand the XML notion of tag attributes indicating whether whitespace is normalized vs. significant.