Compare two XML strings ignoring element order

Question

Suppose I have two xml strings

  a
  b



  b         


        

Answer 1

XMLUnit will do what you want, but you have to specify the elementQualifier. With no elementQualifier specified it will only compare the nodes in the same position.

For your example you want an ElementNameAndTextQualifer, this considers a node similar if one exists that matches the element name and it's text value, something like :

Diff diff = new Diff(control, toTest);
// we don't care about ordering
diff.overrideElementQualifier(new ElementNameAndTextQualifier());
XMLAssert.assertXMLEqual(diff, true);

You can read more about it here: http://xmlunit.sourceforge.net/userguide/html/ar01s03.html#ElementQualifier