NodeMatcher that choses match with least amount of differences

[bodewig]

Some scenarios would benefit from an NodeMatcher that simply "does what I mean": Try all possible pairings of control/test nodes and pick the permutation that contains the least number of differences (and prefer "similar" over "different").

The ElementSelector interface is not suitable since it only sees pairs of nodes but in order to be useful the implementation needs to see all candidate nodes at once.

Probably such a NodeMatcher would require quite a bit of caching of decisions already made. It would also require knowledge of the DifferenceEngine it belongs, at least to the DifferenceEvaluator. On the other hand it should not use the specified ComparisonController and certainly not inform ComparisonListeners at all while searching for candidate matches.

Of course this option would be way more expensive than carefully chosen ElementSelectors, in particular for big documents with many siblings at more than one level of the tree. Therefore it shouldn't be the default choice.

[sunshinecool]

Is anyone working on this issue? I am kind of interested in working on this update.

[bodewig]

I'm not aware of anybody working on it. If you wanted to jump in, that would be great.