cl-difflib

cl-difflib is a Common Lisp library for computing differences between pairs of sequences. It is nearly a transcription of Python's difflib module, which contains the following description of its algorithm:

The basic algorithm predates, and is a little fancier than, an algorithm published in the late 1980's by Ratcliff and Obershelp under the hyperbolic name "gestalt pattern matching". The basic idea is to find the longest contiguous matching subsequence that contains no "junk" elements (R-O doesn't address junk). The same idea is then applied recursively to the pieces of the sequences to the left and to the right of the matching subsequence. This does not yield minimal edit sequences, but does tend to yield matches that "look right" to people.

cl-difflib can do unified diffs:

CL-USER> (unified-diff *standard-output*
		   '("one" "two" "three" "four" "five" "six")
		   '("one" "three" "four" "seven" "six")
		   :test-function #'equal)
---  
+++  
@@ -1,6 +1,5 @@
 one
-two
 three
 four
-five
+seven
 six
; No value

And it can do context diffs:

CL-USER> (context-diff *standard-output*
		   '("one" "two" "three" "four" "five" "six")
		   '("one" "three" "four" "seven" "six")
		   :test-function #'equal)
***  
---  
***************
*** 1,6 ***
  one
- two
  three
  four
! five
  six
--- 1,5 ----
  one
  three
  four
! seven
  six
; No value

It should work on any sequence (as long as the elements can be properly kept track of in a hash table--that's what the :test-function argument is for):

CL-USER> (context-diff *standard-output*
	   #(1 2 3 4 5 6)
	   #(1 3 4 7 6)
	   :from-file "original.fake"
	   :from-file-date "Mon Sep 27 14:13:57 2004"
	   :to-file "modified.fake"
	   :to-file-date "Thu Jan 13 15:55:05 2005")
*** original.fake Mon Sep 27 14:13:57 2004
--- modified.fake Thu Jan 13 15:55:05 2005
***************
*** 1,6 ***
  1
- 2
  3
  4
! 5
  6
--- 1,5 ----
  1
  3
  4
! 7
  6
; No value

It's got some similarity measures:

CL-USER> (defparameter *lisp-symbols* '())
*LISP-SYMBOLS*
CL-USER> (do-external-symbols (sym "COMMON-LISP")
       (push (symbol-name sym) *lisp-symbols*))
NIL
CL-USER> (get-close-matches "PRING" *lisp-symbols*)
("PRINC" "PRINT" "PRIN1")
CL-USER> (get-close-matches "SPROING" *lisp-symbols*)
("STRING" "PROG" "STRINGP")
CL-USER> (get-close-matches "WITH-HASHING-TABLE" *lisp-symbols*)
("HASH-TABLE" "WITH-HASH-TABLE-ITERATOR" "HASH-TABLE-P")

And it's got some lower level building blocks:

CL-USER> (let ((m (make-instance 'sequence-matcher
			     :a '("one" "two" "three" "four" "five" "six")
			     :b '("one" "three" "four" "seven" "six")
			     :test-function #'equal)))
       (pprint (get-opcodes m)))

(#<OPCODE :EQUAL 0 1 0 1> #<OPCODE :DELETE 1 2 1 1> #<OPCODE :EQUAL 2 4 1 3>
 #<OPCODE :REPLACE 4 5 3 4> #<OPCODE :EQUAL 5 6 4 5>)
; No value

Some things it doesn't have: Python difflib's Differ class, and the ndiff or restore functions (maybe someday). It also hasn't been performance tuned. It has some ugly bits of code that look a little Pythonesque. I did change a few things to be more Lispy, but most of the documentation for the Python module should still be applicable.

cl-difflib is pretty simple, but the diffs it generates look decent. It should be completely portable Lisp. And, best of all, you can download it via ASDF-INSTALL.

(Nathan Froyd has some diff code that looks more complicated than this.)

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2005, 2009 John Wiseman

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.