Question

I have to check the differences between two html pages: One is an old version and the other is the updated page.

I need Selenium to get the source of the two pages and then compare them to check the differences.

How can I achieve this using Java & Selenium?

Below is the flow I have:

• Go to the old page using Selenium
• Collect all the data for the old web page
• Convert the data to a standard format (XML probably); create a class
  to do this
• Save the data to a file
• Go to the new page using Selenium
• Collect all the data for the new web page
• Convert the data to a standard format (XML probably); use the class
  you created to do this
• Save the data to a file
• Use a Java library to diff the two files

Can anyone give ideas/examples in how to implement this?

Answer 1

Use selenium.getHtmlSource() for each page and either compare the returned Strings in Java or save them to files and use a command line tool such as “diff”.

If using Java, two methods I can think of are using something like StringUtils.difference() (almost certainly a mess) or better yet Google Diff. Google diff has a Java library and test example.

Of course the outputs of these will be a literal diff, you might want something more custom to make sense of changes in HTML.