hdiff

Diff HTML files (or plain text) by their visible text content.

When a file is detected as HTML, its visible text is extracted before comparison — stripping tags, scripts, and styles. Plain-text files are compared as-is, so you can freely mix HTML and plain-text operands.

Usage

hdiff [OPTIONS] <FILE_A> <FILE_B>

Options

Flag	Description
-U <N>, --unified <N>	Context lines around each change (default: 3)
-q, --brief	Print only whether the files differ, no diff output
-a, --text	Treat both files as plain text (skip HTML detection)
--html-a	Force FILE_A to be treated as HTML
--html-b	Force FILE_B to be treated as HTML
--no-color	Disable ANSI colour output

Exit status

Code	Meaning
0	Files are identical
1	Files differ
2	Error (e.g. file not found)

Examples

# Diff two HTML pages, ignoring markup/style/script changes
hdiff old.html new.html

# Diff an HTML file against a plain-text transcript
hdiff page.html transcript.txt

# Suppress diff output — just check whether they differ
hdiff -q before.html after.html

# No colours, 0 context lines
hdiff --no-color -U 0 a.html b.html

Build

cargo build --release
# Binary: target/release/hdiff

Test

cargo test

# Also run the optional network test (fetches a live Wikipedia page):
cargo test --features net_tests