Text diff
Compare two text files and download a standard unified diff.
Working…
Questions people ask
- Which file is the original?
- The order you add them. The first file is the original (the 'before'); the second is the modified (the 'after'). The list under the drop zone shows the comparison order.
- Are CRLF and LF treated as different?
- Yes, by default: the comparison is byte-faithful, so a line whose only change is its line ending shows up as a change. Choose "normalize" to compare with line endings unified (the diff itself is then emitted with LF only); a pair that differs only by endings reports identical.
- What about a file with no newline at the end?
- It is handled the way git does: the diff shows the "No newline at end of file" marker right after the affected line, on the side that lacks the terminator. Adding or removing that final terminator is a real, visible difference.
- Can the diff be applied with patch tools?
- The output is a standard unified diff with count-annotated hunks. The file headers carry your chosen labels (sanitised: control characters become spaces and leading dashes are stripped so a header can never look like a command-line option) and deliberately no timestamps.
- What if one file is not valid UTF-8?
- You get a diagnostic naming the side and the exact position, never a partial diff and never the raw bytes: a diff of a document that could not be read would be fabrication.
- What if the files are identical?
- A success: you get an empty .diff and an "Identical" verdict in the result; nothing is fabricated.