I've run into an age-old issue but I don’t see any off-the-shelf solutions for.

Suppose I have 2 XML documents I want to compare (not diff, just give me yes/no are they equivalent).

This is pretty simple to do even with things like ignoring whitespace options etc.  Many tools out there, including one I wrote

( http://www.xmlsh.org/CommandXcmp)

Now here's the twist …

Suppose I want to compare for XSD  data model equivalence, not XDM  equivalence ?

Example.

<number>1.0</number>

vs.

<number>1</number>

Without type annotation these are different.
But if I declare the type for number to  be xs:double

they should compare equal.

Thus a compare tool should be able to be given a schema and do a comparison and report that these 2 documents are equivalent at the XSD data model level.

Has anyone seen anything like this ?

Would anyone have a use for it ? (I may end up writing it for my own uses).

Not sure how far one can take this before entering murky waters …

Even in the numeric cases there are edge cases where comparisons are not well defined (rounding/precision issues on floating point numbers).

Then add in things like date/times …

But suppose I'm willing to avoid the murky edges and just stick to the obvious cases … shouldn’t be too hard right ?
In fact I suspect its so obvious its been done but I can't find one anywhere.

-David

----------------------------------------

David A. Lee

dlee@c...

http://www.xmlsh.org