DEHTMLDIFF(1)

💖 DEHTMLDIFF — bestie's guide to yanking a real diff out of an HTML page 💖

okay so, welcome to dehtmldiff, aka the tool that looks at a sad lil web page and goes "bestie… there's a diff in there somewhere, let me get it out for you." 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

dehtmldiff — get usable diff from an HTML page 🌸

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

dehtmldiff [file...]

dehtmldiff {[--help] | [--version]}

like, yes, that's the whole vibe check. you either hand it some files, or you ask it for help or its version. that's it, that's the girl. 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the tea ☕ — dehtmldiff creates usable diff files from HTML pages. iconic behaviour, no cap.

and why would you even want that, you ask? because of this specific scenario: a patch got posted to a mailing list, and the only way you can see it is through a web page. which, lowkey tragic. the HTML mangles it all up and it's giving ✨unusable✨.

so the corrected diff gets sent to standard output. periodt. 💫

⚠️ heads up bestie: you will probably need to use the -l option when applying the patch, so that you ignore any whitespace differences that might be lurking in there. don't skip this, i'm begging 😭

🌈 OPTIONS 🌈

• --help — shows you a short usage message. quick lil "hey here's how i work" moment 🎀
• --version — shows you the version number of dehtmldiff. the "how old am i" reveal 💁‍♀️

💀 LIMITATIONS 💀

okay we need to be real for a sec. 🙈

the way this command works is fairly primitive — it literally boils down to some simple text replacements, followed by an unwrapdiff pass. that's the whole trick. no magic, no fancy parsing, just vibes and find-and-replace.

and because of that: all of the limitations that apply to unwrapdiff also apply to dehtmldiff. every single one. it's giving "the flaws are inherited, sorry babe." 😭

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Tim Waugh <twaugh@redhat.com>

• Package maintainer 💜

and that's the whole page, bestie ✨ go forth and de-HTML your diffs, you absolute main character 🫶💖

patchutils · 17 January 2003 · mwah, bye 👋🎀