What is the best Diff library in Ruby?

Question

I've looked at diff-lcs ( http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/diff-lcs ) but it's poorly documented, and appears to be unmaintained.

Are there any good, actively maintained ruby gems for diffing text or html files?

Answer 1

I don't know about "good"ness, but some places you might go for more information include:

SO search for "ruby diff"

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/80091/diff-a-ruby-string-or-array
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1558613/diff-two-xml-doc-in-ruby
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1402947/how-do-i-compare-2-html-pages-and-output-only-the-different-bits-in-ruby-or-php

Google search for "ruby diff"

• http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/168365
• http://www.freshports.org/textproc/ruby-diff/

Answer 2

I looked around and couldn't find an existing gem or library that offered a convenient way to generate diff style output from ruby.

I just released dirb which does what I want. It's a lightweight wrapper around diff which lets you generate text or html diffs from two strings, without a lot of fuss. I hope others find it useful. It's in use on wiff.me for anyone wants to preview the html output.