Chapter 10. Comparing XML Documents

As an XML developer, you might sometimes be interested in comparing a modified XML document with the pre-modified version of that document. Or you might want to compare two XML documents that are based on the same DTD or XML schema. This chapter is designed to give you the information you need to answer the following questions:

• Is one XML document the same as another?

• What are the differences between two XML documents?

• How to transform one XML document to the other?

Various tools are available to compare XML documents. In the following table we discuss some of the commonly used XML tools to compare XML documents and their features:

XML Comparison Tool	Description
Microsoft XML Diff and Patch Tool	XML Diff compares only the XML-based features and ignores the following features: Order of attributes Insignificant whitespaces Document encoding XML Diff does not differentiate between an empty element, <elementA/>, and an element with no content, <elementA...