Comments on: Did you know that MATLAB has a diff tool?

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:23:41 +0000

This was really helpful. Thanks for posting this three years ago!

By: kiowa

kiowa — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:44:25 +0000

Thank you so much; I had been looking for the diff of Matlab for quite some time!

Diego

By: Mark Jones

Mark Jones — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 01:53:05 +0000

Hi Gauri,

You are welcome. I am happy to see that this article is still helpful nearly 3 years after I wrote it!

Mark

By: Gauri

Gauri — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 11:08:13 +0000

Thanks for the information. I am a beginner and this helped me great deal to figure out a stupid mistake of mine. Thanks a lot.

By: Ken

Ken — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:19:35 +0000

Great point Yair! There actually is an undocumented function visdiff which will do part of what your asking for, namely comparing two files. It only takes file names as input right now.

I’ve created an enhancement request to make this function more robust..

As always, note that this is an undocumented function, so it’s availability and signature may change in the future.

-Ken

By: Yair Altman

Yair Altman — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:11:49 +0000

Readers might be interested to know that the useful diff tool can be ran programatically, as described recently in http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/161225

I hope it doesn’t break in future versions (it very well might since it uses unsupported functionality), but in the meantime it saves the need to interactively specify the input files. If possible, I would love Matlab to have a supported function that does this (and similar functions for all interactive functionality).

-Yair

By: kena

kena — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:04:50 +0000

Tim,

Thanks for the feedback. The ability to compare entire directories is something you’ll likely see in some future release.

We’ll take a look at ways to better handle large runs of identical content.

KEN

By: Tim Davis

Tim Davis — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:57:54 +0000

This color diff in MATLAB is a really useful for comparing two individual files. I like the ability to click on a line that differs and be taken right to the editor with that line highlighted. Thanks!

Unix / Linux has a wonderful option to diff that I use a lot: “diff -r”, which recursively compares two directories. It’s a very useful for looking at two versions of a project with hundreds of files. MATLAB users could really benefit from it, too, I think.

Consider this usage scenario: a user selects two directories (instead of two files) and then selects the menu item which now is worded “Compare Selected Directories”. Then a file-by-file diff appears, comparing each file that matches between the two directories (and subdirectories), or “Only in …” for files that appear in only one directory or another. You would normally skip binary files – just do *.m, *.c, and so forth (perhaps selecting filetypes with another option).

While viewing a single file-diff, it would be nice to have an option of not displaying the greyed out text (lines that are identical between the two files), or to just display a few grey lines for context.