A comprehensive library for generating differences between two strings in multiple formats (unified, side by side HTML etc). Based on the difflib implementation in Python

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Problem 1
    - The requested package chrisboulton/php-diff could not be found in any version, there may be a typo in the package name.

https://packagist.org/packages/chrisboulton/php-diff

This PR fixes PHP7 compatibility - I doubt anyone will merge it back to the upstream repo as that looks almost abandoned - however here it is for those of you like me that this broke for when they started using PHP7

would be nice to have Diff_Renderer_Html_Array::formatLines method protected rather than private so classes extending it can use the method (say you create Diff_Renderer_SideBySide_Html class)

Hello Chris,

i've just written a jQuery plugin. It can be used to merge the files compared by php-diff. I thought you and users of php-diff might find that usefull. Due to the lack of an email address or private message system i builded this pull request containing a litte hint in your readme :)

Thanks for your work!

String offset access with curly braces is no longer allowed in php 8.

     Fatal error: Array and string offset access syntax with curly braces is    
     no longer supported in                                                     
     /home/circleci/project/vendor/chrisboulton/php-diff/lib/Diff/Renderer/Htm  
     l/Array.php on line 153   

ping @chrisboulton

There is already plenty of PRs trying to fix this: https://github.com/chrisboulton/php-diff/pull/32 https://github.com/chrisboulton/php-diff/pull/36, https://github.com/chrisboulton/php-diff/pull/39, and https://github.com/chrisboulton/php-diff/pull/41.

I liked the best solution from https://github.com/chrisboulton/php-diff/pull/41, however I decided to polish it a bit and add test coverage to demostrate that it still works the same.

So I'm using php-diff in a project of mine, and I ran a php-lint like software called xref, https://github.com/gariev/xref , and it pointed me to two different possible bugs in the php-diff code. I've tested this change as best as I can, but I'm not 100% sure I was ever even hitting this code.

I'm submitting this too you in the hopes of you either telling me that no these aren't bugs, or yes they are.

Either way, I just want to say thanks, and I appreciate you putting this library together in the first place.

Cheers,

Looks like you accidentally skipped insertions on each loop, when they should only be skipped on the first loop. The second loop should be skipping deletions instead.

The code tries to replace multiple spaces with "nbsp; " and "nbsp;" depending on whether it is odd or even. The original preg_replace is only capturing the trailing spaces, but replacing all of them, which means the first space always gets silently dropped.

This package (chrisboulton/php-diff) is abandoned and not supported for several years. There's 167 other packages that forked from this root repo, but they are ugly. Most of them doesn't contain any changes. Many other contain questionable changes. A small number of forks contains 1-2 fixes or addition of some functionality necessary to authors. But all these forks are very low quality. Most of forks (as of original repo) doesn't use namespaces which makes difficulties if you want to use Composer's autoloader. There is a few repos that adds namespaces, but they seems to be abandoned too. They mostly are missing "Issues" section, so nobody can report a bug. Code quality is not good enough (at least for me). No unit-tests, no docs, no UTF-8 support. And all forks are crashes with count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable when you making a diff for two arrays where one of them is empty. The error is in lib/Diff/SequenceMatcher.php in setSeq1() and setSeq2() (need replace if($a == $this->a) { to if($a === $this->a) {). This is very simple bug, but nobody found it and fixed.

I've tried these packages:

1. chrisboulton/php-diff -- no namespaces, no multi-byte encodings
2. phpspec/php-diff -- fixed some bugs, possible added multi-byte encodings, but still not namespaces, no Issues section
3. adaptivemedia/php-text-difference -- added namespaces, but no Issues section, no Composer package, dev-stability
4. JBlond/php-diff -- looks like supported, has Issues section, but no namespaces...

Then I found a better alternative of all this misunderstanding -- it's sebastian/diff (https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/diff). It works little different, but it has much better code quality, actively maintaining, supported and the author is an authority in PHP world (he maintain PHPUnit). Actually previously it was a part of PHPUnit but then was factored out. So I recommend to use his package instead and forget about chrisboulton/php-diff and all its forks.

There are two commits: first - remove uneeded /span tag second - addede utf-8 string correct handling. I add as function. But if you want then I can restyle or refactor this commit. Strings for test looks like АБВ and ЭЮЯ

The replace strings only hold the full set string, with this change the string location for the changes is stored on the array and can be used without the html output renderer