I appreciate all of the answers, and found that I was able to make some modifications to this one in particular which seems to be yielding most of what I want. I'm still doing a few post-subroutine substitutions to clear up some text formatting issues, but the following subroutine does the bulk of what needed to be done.

sub comparator {
my $str1 = shift @_;
my $str2 = shift @_;
my $original = '';
my $revised  = '';

my @from = split(/((?:<[^>]+>)+|(?:\s)+|(?:\w[A-Za-z'-]*\w*)+|(?:\W|\P
+{IsWord})|(?:\p{IsDigit}))/, $str1);
my @to   = split(/((?:<[^>]+>)+|(?:\s)+|(?:\w[A-Za-z'-]*\w*)+|(?:\W|\P
+{IsWord})|(?:\p{IsDigit}))/, $str2);

my $OS = qq|<span class="m">|;
my $OE = qq|</span> |;
my $RS = qq|<span class="hl">|;
my $RE = qq|</span> |;

  traverse_sequences( \@from, \@to,
    {
    MATCH     => sub { my $oldtext = $from[shift()]; $original .= $old
+text; $revised .= $oldtext },
    DISCARD_A => sub { my $oldtext = $from[shift()]; if ($oldtext =~ m
+/(?:\p{IsPunct})|(?:\s)/) {$original .= $oldtext } else { $original .
+= $OS.$oldtext.$OE } },
    DISCARD_B => sub { my $newtext = $to[pop()];     if ($newtext =~ m
+/(?:\p{IsPunct})|(?:\s)/) {$revised  .= $newtext } else { $revised  .
+= $RS.$newtext.$RE } },
    } );
    
    return ($original, $revised);
    
} #END SUB comparator

[download]

I have never found the output of a standard diff to be very enlightening. I'm sure it works well to change files, patch-style, but it isn't very readable for someone simply wanting to see what happened to the text in a side-by-side format. This procedure is making a visual inspection much easier, with the help of some HTML markup.

Thank you!

Blessings,

~Polyglot~

In reply to Re^2: Comparing two text files and marking differences by Polyglot
in thread Comparing two text files and marking differences by Polyglot

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.