[Mediawiki-api] Get diffs?

[Max Semenik]

On 20.08.2008, 10:55 Brianna wrote:

> Hi,

> Is it possible the API could provide diffs? Ie you provide two
> revision IDs, get a diff-style output back. This is something that is
> available through MediaWiki itself via the history page, but not the
> API.

> <http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/includes/Diff.php?view=markup>
> doesn't look like it is particularly straightforward to implement, and
> rather than doing so, couldn't it be made available via the API?

> Also... a 'diff view' would also be much more useful in the page
> history feeds. As they stand now they seem quite useless to me.

> Thoughts?

> cheers
> Brianna


If you want to have a fast bot, you'll eventually want to avoid
generating diffs on-server. There are plenty of existing dif
implementations on most of popular languages, and significant part of
them if based on Algorithm::Diff just like MediaWiki's one, so results
will be quite similar. The only situation where building diff HTML may
be beneficial is when you don't have both texts to compare, but in
that case you still may scrape index.php's diffs, throwing away
everything but <table class="diff> contents.

Probavly, API still may need to diff itself, but in most cases bots
don't need it.

-- 
Best regards,
  Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])