Comparing two files in PHP

Our PHP solution is designed to give you the best possible results when using a complex comparison algorithm. So, you no longer need to manually look up differences in documents – feel free to use our API to diff two files.

Our comparison engine looks for differences at the level of characters or whole words. And if only one character was changed, the whole word will be highlighted as changed. All found changes can be clearly viewed in the output and exported in a convenient format.

The most popular types of comparison are comparing PDF and Word files. Therefore, we will learn our PHP diff tool and its comparison function using these examples.

Compare PDF in PHP

Sometimes you need to make sure that your PDF document has not been modified and compare it with the original version. Or you already know that your PDF has really changed, and you need to look where and how. Then you can compare two versions of PDF files and see the differences. And to avoid doing it manually, just use our PHP diff checker API.

With our PHP solution, you will see even small changes that you could easily miss in a manual comparison.

Compare two Word documents using PHP

Word documents are fairly easy to change, so it is important to compare Word files to make sure parts or the entire document have not changed.

To compare Word files, use our PHP solution, just like with PDF. You can do this in the example below.

Сompare two documents

To see how our PHP document compare works, load two files you want to compare and choose an export file format.

After the comparison is completed, the document with the diff will be automatically downloaded in the format you selected.

It is important that the documents being compared must not have any revisions before the comparison, so we need to accept all revisions before the compare starts. Do not worry, we have taken care of that in our example:

Compare 2 files using PHP

Input files

Upload the compared file

Run code

Upload the second file to compare

Output format

Select the target format from the list

use Aspose\Words\WordsApi;

$wordsApi = new WordsApi('####-####-####-####-####', '##################');
$fileName1 = "Input1.docx";
$fileName2 = "Input2.docx";
$fileResult = "Output.docx";

/**
 *  Upload documents to cloud storage.
 */
$firstDocumentContent = $fileName1;
$uploadFirstFileRequest = new UploadFileRequest(
    $firstDocumentContent, $fileName1, NULL
);
$wordsApi->uploadFile($uploadFirstFileRequest);

$secondDocumentContent = $fileName2;
$uploadSecondFileRequest = new UploadFileRequest(
    $secondDocumentContent, $fileName2, NULL
);
$wordsApi->uploadFile($uploadSecondFileRequest);

/**
 *  Compare documents in cloud.
 */
$compareDataOptions = new CompareData(array(
    "author" => "author",
    "comparing_with_document" => $fileName2,
));
$compareDocumentRequest = new CompareDocumentRequest(
    $fileName1, $compareDataOptions, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, $fileResult, NULL
);
$wordsApi->compareDocument($compareDocumentRequest);

/**
 *  Download result document from cloud storage.
 */
$downloadFileRequest = new DownloadFileRequest(
    $fileResult, NULL, NULL
);
$downloadFileResult = $wordsApi->downloadFile($downloadFileRequest);
rename(reset($downloadFileResult)->getPathname(), 'compareResult.pdf');

					Run code
				

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How to Compare two versions of a file

Install Aspose.Words Cloud for PHP
Add a library reference (import the library) to your PHP project
Load two documents to compare
Call the compareDocument() method to compare two docs
Download the result document from the cloud storage

PHP library to use compare

Install 'Aspose.Words Cloud SDK for PHP' from Packagist repository. Just run composer require aspose-cloud/aspose-words-cloud to install the SDK, then use require_once('vendor/autoload.php'); to import it into your project.

As an alternative, you can manually clone Aspose.Words Cloud SDK for PHP source code from GitHub. Please follow these Instructions to quickly get the necessary security credentials and access our REST API.