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

Answer 2

I don't know what versions they took for the solutions, but nothing worked (or was simple at least) so here's my solution for who had the same pains.

P.S. I hate people to miss the imports or the FQN class names of static methods

    @Test
void given2XMLS_are_different_elements_sequence_with_whitespaces(){
    String testXml = "<struct><int>3</int>  <boolean>false</boolean> </struct>";
    String expected = "<struct><boolean>false</boolean><int>3</int></struct>";

    XmlAssert.assertThat(testXml).and(expected)
            .ignoreWhitespace()
            .normalizeWhitespace()
            .withNodeMatcher(new DefaultNodeMatcher(ElementSelectors.byNameAndText))
            .areSimilar();
}