Using 'diff' (or anything else) to get character-level diff between text files

Question

I\'d like to use \'diff\' to get a both line difference between and character difference. For example, consider:

File 1

abcde
ab         


        

Answer 1

cmp -l file1 file2 | wc

Worked well for me. The leftmost number of the result indicates the number of characters that differ.