Highlight the difference between two strings in PHP

php string diff word-diff
Philip Morton picture Philip Morton · Nov 26, 2008 · Viewed 108.4k times · Source

What is the easiest way to highlight the difference between two strings in PHP?

I'm thinking along the lines of the Stack Overflow edit history page, where new text is in green and removed text is in red. If there are any pre-written functions or classes available, that would be ideal.

Answer

R. Hill picture R. Hill · Feb 22, 2011

Just wrote a class to compute smallest (not to be taken literally) number of edits to transform one string into another string:

http://www.raymondhill.net/finediff/

It has a static function to render a HTML version of the diff.

It's a first version, and likely to be improved, but it works just fine as of now, so I am throwing it out there in case someone needs to generate a compact diff efficiently, like I needed.

Edit: It's on Github now: https://github.com/gorhill/PHP-FineDiff

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