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I want to compare two XML files and want to know if both the files are same or not. But I want to ignore the inner text difference. It should say it's different when there's a difference in structure i.e some new tags are added.

I tried XML Diff, But I didn't get an option to ignore the inner text in the XmlDiffOptions.

I even tried the answers in how-would-you-compare-two-xml-documents, but didn't worked for me.

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Jibin Balachandran
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    Don't know how much sense it would make to ignore inner text :/ Perhaps you could preprocess the doument, remove all the inner text you want to ignore and then use the xmldiff api? – gideon Jan 03 '17 at 08:34

1 Answers1

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Generally the simplest way to "compare two XML files while ignoring ZZZ" is to transform both files to eliminate ZZZ, and then use a standard comparison method (for example the XPath deep-equal() function, or canonicalization followed by string comparison).

In your case if ZZZ is "the content of text nodes", transform both files using XSLT to eliminate text nodes, and then compare. For example (XSLT 2.0):

<xsl:template name="main">
  <result><xsl:value-of 
    select="deep-equal(f:prep($doc1), f:prep($doc2))"/>
  </result>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:function name="f:prep" as="document-node">
  <xsl:param name="doc" as="document-node()"/>
  <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:function>

<xsl:template match="*">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="text()"/>
Michael Kay
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