I've found a workaround for one of yesterday's annoyances, at least the one where a "folder compare" function (not really a file directory) in Informatica PowerCenter doesn't really compare everything in the folders. You can export folders as XML documents, so that's what I did, and then used XML::Diff to compare the documents.
Except that some of the elements in one document are not in the same order as the other document, and although I don't care, XML::Diff does. There are some commercial tools that will compare unordered XML elements, and I ran across one that I guess was free but is no longer.
So it was XML::Filter::Sort to the rescue (thank you grantm - and all the other XML folks), and I just sorted all the elements where I didn't care about the order, and then diffed the results. Several of the elements where just sorted by the name attribute, so I made a bunch of sorters in one go:(Updated code: Needed "./" prefix on NAME)
my @sorters = (
map {
XML::Filter::Sort->new(
Record => $_,
Keys => [ ['./@NAME'] ],
)
) @list_of_elements
);
I also wrote my first actual XML::SAX parser for the task of deleting some attributes where I didn't care about differences in values.
And some of the attributes had encoded control
characters in them e.g.
,
and those just came out as spaces, and for the
purposes of this, I didn't care, but in other
situations, I might care, so I'm wondering if there's
a way to preserve those. Though I hear from a
reliable secondhand source that there is no
reliable way to preserve them :-(
Re:Alternatively: XML::SemanticDiff
runrig on 2007-08-08T17:25:38
I looked at XML::SemanticDiff, and XML::Diff seems to suit my purposes better. XML::SemanticDiff tells you that there's a difference and where the difference is, and XML::Diff tells you all that plus what the difference is, though the output is more verbose. And I would still have to sort and filter things to see the actual differences that I want to see.