Compare XML snippets?

Question

Building on another SO question, how can one check whether two well-formed XML snippets are semantically equal. All I need is \"equal\" or not, since I\'m using this for un

Answer 1

Here a simple solution, convert XML into dictionaries (with xmltodict) and compare dictionaries together

import json
import xmltodict

class XmlDiff(object):
    def __init__(self, xml1, xml2):
        self.dict1 = json.loads(json.dumps((xmltodict.parse(xml1))))
        self.dict2 = json.loads(json.dumps((xmltodict.parse(xml2))))

    def equal(self):
        return self.dict1 == self.dict2

unit test

import unittest

class XMLDiffTestCase(unittest.TestCase):

    def test_xml_equal(self):
        xml1 = """
        
        """
        xml2 = """
        
        """
        self.assertTrue(XmlDiff(xml1, xml2).equal())

    def test_xml_not_equal(self):
        xml1 = """
        
        """
        xml2 = """
        
        """
        self.assertFalse(XmlDiff(xml1, xml2).equal())

or in simple python method :

import json
import xmltodict

def xml_equal(a, b):
    """
    Compares two XML documents (as string or etree)

    Does not care about element order
    """
    return json.loads(json.dumps((xmltodict.parse(a)))) == json.loads(json.dumps((xmltodict.parse(b))))