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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T21:41:25+00:00

I’d like to convert the output of diff (on a Markdown file) to Markdown

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I’d like to convert the output of diff (on a Markdown file) to
Markdown with <strike> and <em> tags, so that I can see what has
been removed from or added to a new version of a document. (This kind of
treatment is very common for legal documents.)

Example of hoped-for output:

Why do weWe study programming languages? notNot in order to …

One of the many
difficulties is that diff’s output is line-oriented, where I want to
see differences in individual words. Does anyone have suggestions as
to what algorithm to use, or what software to build on?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use wdiff. It already does the word-by-word comparison you’re looking for; converting its output to markdown should take just a few simple regular expressions.

    For example:

    $ cat foo
Why do we study programming languages?  Not in order to
$ cat bar
We study programming languages not in order to
$ wdiff foo bar
[-Why do we-]{+We+} study programming [-languages?  Not-] {+languages not+} in order to
$ wdiff foo bar | sed 's|\[-|<em>|g;s|-]|</em>|g;s|{+|<strike>|g;s|+}|</strike>|g'
<em>Why do we</em><strike>We</strike> study programming <em>languages?  Not</em> <strike>languages not</strike> in order to

    Edit: Actually, wdiff has some options that make it even easier:

    $ wdiff -w '<em>' -x '</em>' -y '<strike>' -z '</strike>' foo bar
<em>Why do we</em><strike>We</strike> study programming <em>languages?  Not</em> <strike>languages not</strike> in order to
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