Compare XML snippets?

If you take a DOM approach, you can traverse the two trees simultaneously while comparing nodes (node type, text, attributes) as you go.

A recursive solution will be the most elegant – just short-circuit further comparison once a pair of nodes are not “equal” or once you detect a leaf in one tree when it’s a branch in another, etc.

I had the same problem: two documents I wanted to compare that had the same attributes but in different orders.

It seems that XML Canonicalization (C14N) in lxml works well for this, but I’m definitely not an XML expert. I’m curious to know if somebody else can point out drawbacks to this approach.

parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)

xml1 = etree.fromstring(xml_string1, parser)
xml2 = etree.fromstring(xml_string2, parser)

print "xml1 == xml2: " + str(xml1 == xml2)

ppxml1 = etree.tostring(xml1, pretty_print=True)
ppxml2 = etree.tostring(xml2, pretty_print=True)

print "pretty(xml1) == pretty(xml2): " + str(ppxml1 == ppxml2)

xml_string_io1 = StringIO()
xml1.getroottree().write_c14n(xml_string_io1)
cxml1 = xml_string_io1.getvalue()

xml_string_io2 = StringIO()
xml2.getroottree().write_c14n(xml_string_io2)
cxml2 = xml_string_io2.getvalue()

print "canonicalize(xml1) == canonicalize(xml2): " + str(cxml1 == cxml2)

Running this gives me:

$ python test.py 
xml1 == xml2: false
pretty(xml1) == pretty(xml2): false
canonicalize(xml1) == canonicalize(xml2): true

Thinking about this problem, I came up with the following solution that renders XML elements comparable and sortable:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
def cmpElement(x, y):
    # compare type
    r = cmp(type(x), type(y))
    if r: return r 
    # compare tag
    r = cmp(x.tag, y.tag)
    if r: return r
    # compare tag attributes
    r = cmp(x.attrib, y.attrib)
    if r: return r
    # compare stripped text content
    xtext = (x.text and x.text.strip()) or None
    ytext = (y.text and y.text.strip()) or None
    r = cmp(xtext, ytext)
    if r: return r
    # compare sorted children
    if len(x) or len(y):
        return cmp(sorted(x.getchildren()), sorted(y.getchildren()))
    return 0

ET._ElementInterface.__lt__ = lambda self, other: cmpElement(self, other) == -1
ET._ElementInterface.__gt__ = lambda self, other: cmpElement(self, other) == 1
ET._ElementInterface.__le__ = lambda self, other: cmpElement(self, other) <= 0
ET._ElementInterface.__ge__ = lambda self, other: cmpElement(self, other) >= 0
ET._ElementInterface.__eq__ = lambda self, other: cmpElement(self, other) == 0
ET._ElementInterface.__ne__ = lambda self, other: cmpElement(self, other) != 0

The order of the elements can be significant in XML, this may be why most other methods suggested will compare unequal if the order is different… even if the elements have same attributes and text content.

But I also wanted an order-insensitive comparison, so I came up with this:

from lxml import etree
import xmltodict  # pip install xmltodict


def normalise_dict(d):
    """
    Recursively convert dict-like object (eg OrderedDict) into plain dict.
    Sorts list values.
    """
    out = {}
    for k, v in dict(d).iteritems():
        if hasattr(v, 'iteritems'):
            out[k] = normalise_dict(v)
        elif isinstance(v, list):
            out[k] = []
            for item in sorted(v):
                if hasattr(item, 'iteritems'):
                    out[k].append(normalise_dict(item))
                else:
                    out[k].append(item)
        else:
            out[k] = v
    return out


def xml_compare(a, b):
    """
    Compares two XML documents (as string or etree)

    Does not care about element order
    """
    if not isinstance(a, basestring):
        a = etree.tostring(a)
    if not isinstance(b, basestring):
        b = etree.tostring(b)
    a = normalise_dict(xmltodict.parse(a))
    b = normalise_dict(xmltodict.parse(b))
    return a == b

Adapting Anentropic’s great answer to Python 3 (basically, change iteritems() to items(), and basestring to string):

from lxml import etree
import xmltodict  # pip install xmltodict

def normalise_dict(d):
    """
    Recursively convert dict-like object (eg OrderedDict) into plain dict.
    Sorts list values.
    """
    out = {}
    for k, v in dict(d).items():
        if hasattr(v, 'iteritems'):
            out[k] = normalise_dict(v)
        elif isinstance(v, list):
            out[k] = []
            for item in sorted(v):
                if hasattr(item, 'iteritems'):
                    out[k].append(normalise_dict(item))
                else:
                    out[k].append(item)
        else:
            out[k] = v
    return out


def xml_compare(a, b):
    """
    Compares two XML documents (as string or etree)

    Does not care about element order
    """
    if not isinstance(a, str):
        a = etree.tostring(a)
    if not isinstance(b, str):
        b = etree.tostring(b)
    a = normalise_dict(xmltodict.parse(a))
    b = normalise_dict(xmltodict.parse(b))
    return a == b

Since the order of attributes is not significant in XML, you want to ignore differences due to different attribute orderings and XML canonicalization (C14N) deterministically orders attributes, you can that method for testing equality:

xml1 = b'''    <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
    <Stats start="1275955200" end="1276041599"></Stats>'''
xml2 = b'''     <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
    <Stats end="1276041599" start="1275955200"></Stats>'''
xml3 = b''' <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
    <Stats start="1275955200"></Stats>'''

import lxml.etree

tree1 = lxml.etree.fromstring(xml1.strip())
tree2 = lxml.etree.fromstring(xml2.strip())
tree3 = lxml.etree.fromstring(xml3.strip())

import io

b1 = io.BytesIO()
b2 = io.BytesIO()
b3 = io.BytesIO()

tree1.getroottree().write_c14n(b1)
tree2.getroottree().write_c14n(b2)
tree3.getroottree().write_c14n(b3)

assert b1.getvalue() == b2.getvalue()
assert b1.getvalue() != b3.getvalue()

Note that this example assumes Python 3. With Python 3, the use of b'''...''' strings and io.BytesIO is mandatory, while with Python 2 this method also works with normal strings and io.StringIO.

Here a simple solution, convert XML into dictionaries (with xmltodict) and compare dictionaries together

import json
import xmltodict

class XmlDiff(object):
    def __init__(self, xml1, xml2):
        self.dict1 = json.loads(json.dumps((xmltodict.parse(xml1))))
        self.dict2 = json.loads(json.dumps((xmltodict.parse(xml2))))

    def equal(self):
        return self.dict1 == self.dict2

unit test

import unittest

class XMLDiffTestCase(unittest.TestCase):

    def test_xml_equal(self):
        xml1 = """<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
        <Stats start="1275955200" end="1276041599">
        </Stats>"""
        xml2 = """<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
        <Stats end="1276041599" start="1275955200" >
        </Stats>"""
        self.assertTrue(XmlDiff(xml1, xml2).equal())

    def test_xml_not_equal(self):
        xml1 = """<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
        <Stats start="1275955200">
        </Stats>"""
        xml2 = """<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' standalone='yes'?>
        <Stats end="1276041599" start="1275955200" >
        </Stats>"""
        self.assertFalse(XmlDiff(xml1, xml2).equal())

or in simple python method :

import json
import xmltodict

def xml_equal(a, b):
    """
    Compares two XML documents (as string or etree)

    Does not care about element order
    """
    return json.loads(json.dumps((xmltodict.parse(a)))) == json.loads(json.dumps((xmltodict.parse(b))))

SimpleTAL uses a custom xml.sax handler to compare xml-documents
https://github.com/janbrohl/SimpleTAL/blob/python2/tests/TALTests/XMLTests/TALAttributeTestCases.py#L47-L112
(the results for getXMLChecksum are compared)
but I prefer generating a list instead of a md5-hash

What about the following code snippet ? Can be easily enhanced to include attribs as well :

def separator(self):
    return "!@#$%^&*" # Very ugly separator

def _traverseXML(self, xmlElem, tags, xpaths):
    tags.append(xmlElem.tag)
    for e in xmlElem:
        self._traverseXML(e, tags, xpaths)

    text = ''
    if (xmlElem.text):
        text = xmlElem.text.strip()

    xpaths.add("/".join(tags) + self.separator() + text)
    tags.pop()

def _xmlToSet(self, xml):
    xpaths = set() # output
    tags = list()
    root = ET.fromstring(xml)
    self._traverseXML(root, tags, xpaths)

    return xpaths

def _areXMLsAlike(self, xml1, xml2):
    xpaths1 = self._xmlToSet(xml1)
    xpaths2 = self._xmlToSet(xml2)`enter code here`

    return xpaths1 == xpaths2