Formatting diff files as HTML

24May08

I wanted to add diff viewing function to my codenotifier tool and all I found in Ruby was this CGI/command line script. I adopted it to show line numbers, handle multifile diffs and make output similar to one of Trac, and integrated it to codenotifier. Plus, in case anybody else needs it, I created diff_to_html.rb opensource project at GitHub (liked it a lot btw!), which makes it available as a gem, like this:

gem install artemv-diff_to_html --source=http://gems.github.com

Enjoy!

The code is far from being perfect, actually I wonder why it works in some cases, plus it could output better (e.g. I like changeset viewer at GitHub – it puts the changes and line numbers in separate DIVs – this way you could simply select changes without line numbers.. at price of (sometimes) horizontal scrollbar I guess. The funny thing is that at GitHub result is still mixed with comment counters for each line – it was so close to being perfect.. as always :)

So, patches/contributions are very welcome.

Related links:

• blog entry on Codenotifier’s diffs
• sample diff at Codenotifier, from Shoes project
• original code by Adam Doppelt (thanks man!) appears in his blog entry (blogs became an important source of code, huh?)
• diff_to_html.rb project at GitHub

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Diff Command in UNIX
• nixhacker : Various resources for the *nix command line hacker

Filed under: codenotifier, diff_to_html.rb, my projects, opensource, ruby   |  2 Comments