Text difference algorithm
c#, diff, python
Solution
In Python, there is difflib, as also others have suggested.
`difflib` offers the SequenceMatcher class, which can be used to give you a similarity ratio. Example function:
def text_compare(text1, text2, isjunk=None):
return difflib.SequenceMatcher(isjunk, text1, text2).ratio()
Problem
I need an algorithm that can compare two text files and highlight their difference and ( even better!) can compute their difference in a meaningful way (like two similar files should have a similarity score higher than two dissimilar files, with the word "similar" defined in the normal terms). It sounds easy to implement, but it's not. The implementation can be in c# or python. Thanks.