coopyhx

This is a library for comparing tables, producing a summary of their differences, and using such a summary as a patch file. It is optimized for comparing tables that share a common origin, in other words multiple versions of the "same" table. It is written in Haxe, translated to Javascript for in-browser use. The library may also be compiled as C++.

For a live demo, see:

http://paulfitz.github.com/coopyhx/

Get the core library here:

http://paulfitz.github.com/coopyhx/coopy/coopy.js

To apply the library to regular javascript 2D arrays, you'll also want:

http://paulfitz.github.com/coopyhx/coopy/scripts/coopy_view.js

This library is a stripped down version of the coopy toolbox (see http://share.find.coop). To compare tables from different origins, or with automatically generated IDs, or other complications, check out the coopy toolbox.

The basics

First, include coopy.js for the basic library and coopy_view.js to use that library with regular 2D arrays:

<script src="coopy.js"></script>
<script src="coopy_view.js"></script>

For concreteness, assume we have two versions of a table, data1 and data2:

var data1 = [
    ['Country','Capital'],
    ['Ireland','Dublin'],
    ['France','Paris'],
    ['Spain','Barcelona']
];
var data2 = [
    ['Country','Code','Capital'],
    ['Ireland','ie','Dublin'],
    ['France','fr','Paris'],
    ['Spain','es','Madrid'],
    ['Germany','de','Berlin']
];

To make those tables accessible to the library, we wrap them in coopy.CoopyTableView:

var table1 = new coopy.CoopyTableView(data1);
var table2 = new coopy.CoopyTableView(data2);

We can now compute the alignment between the rows and columns in the two tables:

var alignment = coopy.compareTables(table1,table2).align();

To produce a diff from the alignment, we first need a table for the output:

var data_diff = [];
var table_diff = new coopy.CoopyTableView(data_diff);

Using default options for the diff:

var flags = new coopy.CompareFlags();
var highlighter = new coopy.TableDiff(alignment,flags);
highlighter.hilite(table_diff);

The diff is now in table_diff, in highlighter format, see specification here:

http://share.find.coop/doc/spec_hilite.html

For 3-way differences (that is, comparing two tables given knowledge of a common ancestor) use coopy.compareTables3 (give ancestor table as the first argument).

Here is how to apply that difference as a patch:

var patcher = new coopy.HighlightPatch(table1,table_diff);
patcher.apply();
// table1 should now equal table2