Related Tool
Text Diff
Compare text files and see differences line by line. All processing occurs locally in your browser.
Related Tools
Compares two blocks of text line by line and prints the difference: unchanged lines are indented by two spaces, a changed line appears as a - line followed by a + line, and a line present in only one block is prefixed with - or + on its own. Both blocks stay in the page.
How to use it
- Paste the original into the first box and the revised version into the second.
- Press Diff.
- Read the output: a leading space means unchanged, - means removed, + means added.
Worked example
cat
dog
fish || cat
bird
fish
newbecomes Hello world
- This is line 2
+ This is line two
Line 3
+ Line 4
The part before || is pasted into Text A, the part after into Text B. The trailing newline is part of the output.
When to use it
- Seeing exactly what changed between two revisions of a config file or a paragraph.
- Confirming that an edit touched only the lines you intended.
- Comparing two pasted snippets when no diff command is available on the machine.
What it does not do
- The comparison is positional, not a real diff: line 1 is compared with line 1 and so on. Inserting one line near the top therefore marks every following line as changed.
- Because it is positional, moving a block of text reports both the old and the new location as changes even though the content is identical.
- Line endings and trailing spaces count. Text copied from Windows with \r\n will differ from the same text saved with \n on every line.
- When the two blocks match exactly the output reads Files are identical rather than showing an empty result, and there is no word-level or character-level highlighting.