HashDiff

HashDiff is a ruby library to compute the smallest difference between two hashes.

Why HashDiff?

Given two Hashes A and B, sometimes you face the question: what's the smallest changes that can be made to change A to B?

An algorithm responds to this question has to do following:

Generate a list of additions, deletions and changes, so that A + ChangeSet = B and B - ChangeSet = A.
Compute recursively -- Arrays and Hashes may be nested arbitrarily in A or B.
Compute the smallest change -- it should recoganize similar child Hashes or child Arrays between A and B.

HashDiff answers the question above in an opinionated approach:

Hash can be represented as a list of (dot-syntax-path, value) pairs. For example, {a:[{c:2}]} can be represented as ["a[0].c", 2].
The change set can be represented using the do-syntax representation. For example, [['-', 'b.x', 3], ['~', 'b.z', 45, 30], ['+', 'b.y', 3]].
It compares Arrays using LCS(longest common subsequence) algorithm.
It recoganize similar Hashes in Array using a similarity value(0 < similarity <= 1).

Usage

If you're using bundler, add following to the Gemfile:

gem 'hashdiff'

Or, you can run gem install hashdiff, then add following line to your ruby file which uses HashDiff:

require 'hashdiff'

Quick Start

Diff

Two simple hash:

a = {a:3, b:2}
b = {}

diff = HashDiff.diff(a, b)
diff.should == [['-', 'a', 3], ['-', 'b', 2]]

More complex hash:

a = {a:{x:2, y:3, z:4}, b:{x:3, z:45}}
b = {a:{y:3}, b:{y:3, z:30}}

diff = HashDiff.diff(a, b)
diff.should == [['-', 'a.x', 2], ['-', 'a.z', 4], ['-', 'b.x', 3], ['~', 'b.z', 45, 30], ['+', 'b.y', 3]]

Array in hash:

a = {a:[{x:2, y:3, z:4}, {x:11, y:22, z:33}], b:{x:3, z:45}}
b = {a:[{y:3}, {x:11, z:33}], b:{y:22}}

diff = HashDiff.best_diff(a, b)
diff.should == [['-', 'a[0].x', 2], ['-', 'a[0].z', 4], ['-', 'a[1].y', 22], ['-', 'b.x', 3], ['-', 'b.z', 45], ['+', 'b.y', 22]]

Patch

patch example:

a = {a: 3}
b = {a: {a1: 1, a2: 2}}

diff = HashDiff.diff(a, b)
HashDiff.patch!(a, diff).should == b

unpatch example:

a = [{a: 1, b: 2, c: 3, d: 4, e: 5}, {x: 5, y: 6, z: 3}, 1]
b = [1, {a: 1, b: 2, c: 3, e: 5}]

diff = HashDiff.diff(a, b) # diff two array is OK
HashDiff.unpatch!(b, diff).should == a

Options

You can specify the delimiter to be something else than the dot. For example:

a = {a:{x:2, y:3, z:4}, b:{x:3, z:45}}
b = {a:{y:3}, b:{y:3, z:30}}

diff = HashDiff.diff(a, b, :delimiter => '\t')
diff.should == [['-', 'a\tx', 2], ['-', 'a\tz', 4], ['-', 'b\tx', 3], ['~', 'b\tz', 45, 30], ['+', 'b\ty', 3]]

In cases you have similar hash objects in array, you can pass suitable :similarity value instead of the default 0.8.

Contributors

License

HashDiff is distributed under the MIT-LICENSE.