Re: [Xmlunit-general] Can one ignore empty tags when comparing

[Stefan B. <bo...@ap...>]

On 2010-09-28, Miguel wrote:

> I have a doubt though: I'm trying to compare 2 XML files for their
> content. This means that:

> 		<primarysource>
> 			<reportertitle>Dr</reportertitle>
> 			<reportergivename>Antonio</reportergivename>
> 			<reportermiddlename></reportermiddlename>
> 			<reporterfamilyname>Perez</reporterfamilyname>
>                   <primarysource>

> and
>                 <primarysource>
>                         <reportertitle>Dr</reportertitle>
>                         <reportergivename>Antonio</reportergivename>
>                         <reporterfamilyname>Perez</reporterfamilyname>
>                   <primarysource>

> Are similar, because the non-null/empty content is essentially the same.

> Is there an option on xmlunit to make the Diff engine ignore empty tags
> so that these XML are calculated to be similar?

No, no built-in option.  You could write an implementation of
DifferenceListener
<http://xmlunit.sourceforge.net/userguide/html/ar01s03.html#DifferenceListener>
which would check whether the Node that is part of a CHILD_NODE_NOT
difference has an empty text content and return
RETURN_IGNORE_DIFFERENCE_NODES_SIMILAR in that case.

You will also want to disable compareUnmateched
<http://xmlunit.sourceforge.net/userguide/html/ar01s03.html#Comparison%20of%20Unmatched%20Elements>

Stefan