caption: diff-text
created: 20180316162725329
modified: 20180316162725329
tags: Widgets
title: DiffTextWidget
type: text/vnd.tiddlywiki

! Introduction

<<.from-version "5.1.16">> The diff text widget analyses the differences between a pair of source and destination text strings and displays the results as highlighted insertions and deletions (similar to the "track changes" function of a word processor). For example:

<$diff-text source="Hey Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better. Remember to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better." dest="Hey Jude, don't be afraid. You were made to go out and get her. The minute you let her under your skin. Then you begin to make it better."/>

! Content and Attributes

!! Content

The content of the `<$diff-text>` widget is rendered immediately before the diffs. Within it, the variable `diff-count` is available, containing the number of differences found. If the widget has no content then it automatically transcludes the tiddler [[$:/language/Diffs/CountMessage]].

<<<
In other words, these three invocations are all equivalent:

```
<$diff-text source={{FirstTiddler}} dest={{SecondTiddler}}>
{{$:/language/Diffs/CountMessage}}
</$diff-text>

<$diff-text source={{FirstTiddler}} dest={{SecondTiddler}}>
</$diff-text>

<$diff-text source={{FirstTiddler}} dest={{SecondTiddler}}/>

```
<<<

!! Attributes

|!Attribute |!Description |
|source |The source text |
|dest |The destination text |
|cleanup |See below |

The ''cleanup'' attribute determines which optional post-processing should be applied to the diffs:

* ''none'': no cleanup is performed
* ''semantic'' (default): rewrites the diffs for human readability
* ''efficient'': rewrites the diffs to minimise the number of operations for subsequent processing 

(Note that in many cases the results will be the same regardless of the cleanup option. See the [[docs|https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/API]] of the underlying library for more details).

! Examples

In this example we compare two texts:

<$macrocall $name='wikitext-example-without-html'
src="""<$edit-text tiddler="SampleTiddlerFirst"/>

<$edit-text tiddler="SampleTiddlerSecond"/>

<$diff-text source={{SampleTiddlerFirst}} dest={{SampleTiddlerSecond}}/>"""/>