Patent Application - Method and system for efficiently indentifying differences between large files > Summary

Patent Application No. US 20050131860

Published on Jun 16, 2005

Application No. 11/034965

Filed on Jan 14, 2005

Priority Date -

Livshits, Artem Y. - Bellevue, WA US (12)

Methods and data structures are disclosed for carrying out identifying differences between large files comprising many lines (or other units of comparison such as rows, words, paragraphs, sentences, etc.). The disclosed methods and data structures facilitate and carry out a streamlined, yet thorough comparison of two files to identify differences between them. The streamlining is achieved by pre-processing the files prior to submitting them to any known longest common subsequence (LCS) search engine. The output of the LCS generator is post-processed to compensate for changes to the sequences introduced by the pre-processing stage.