This package contains the implementation of the patiencediff algorithm, as first described by Bram Cohen.

Like Python's difflib, this module provides both a convenience unified_diff function for the generation of unified diffs of text files as well as a SequenceMatcher that can be used on arbitrary lists.

Patiencediff provides a good balance of performance, nice output for humans, and implementation simplicity.

The code in this package was extracted from the Bazaar code base.

The package comes with two implementations:

• A Python implementation (_patiencediff_py.py); this implementation only requires a Python interpreter and is the more readable version of the two
• A C implementation implementation (_patiencediff_c.c); this implementation is faster, but requires a C compiler and is less readable

To invoke patiencediff from the command-line:

python -m patiencediff file_a file_b

Or from Python:

>>> import patiencediff
>>> print(''.join(patiencediff.unified_diff(
...      ['a\n', 'b\n', 'b\n', 'c\n'],
...      ['a\n', 'c\n', 'b\n'])))
---
+++
@@ -1,4 +1,3 @@
 a
+c
 b
-b
-c