# The textproc/spiff port

## spiff-1.0p1 – very flexible diff-like program

## Description

    Spiff compares the contents of two files and prints a description
    of the important differences between the files.  White space is
    ignored except to separate other objects.  Spiff maintains tolerances
    below which differences between two floating point numbers are
    ignored.  Differences in floating point notation (such as 3.4 3.40
    and 3.4e01) are treated as unimportant.  User specified delimited
    strings (i.e. comments) can also be ignored.  There are options for
    C and other languages; comments are understood and normally ignored.
    Inside other user specified delimited strings (i.e. quoted strings)
    whitespace can be significant.

    Spiff's operation can be altered via command line options, a command
    script, and with commands that are embedded in the input files.

    Each of two input files is read and stored in core.  Then it is
    parsed into a series of tokens (literal strings and floating point
    numbers, white space is ignored).  The token sequences are stored
    in core as well.  After both files have been parsed, a differencing
    algorithm is applied to the token sequences.  The differencing
    algorithm produces an edit script, which is then passed to an output
    routine.  The result is much slower than regular diff, but much
    more controllable.

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Categories:
  textproc

## Library dependencies

## Build dependencies

## Run dependencies