Open source command line tool for Linux to diff XML files ignoring element order

Question

Is there an open source command-line tool (for Linux) to diff XML files which ignores the element order?

Example input file a.xml:

Answer 1

I had a similar problem and I eventually found: https://superuser.com/questions/79920/how-can-i-diff-two-xml-files

That post suggests doing a canonical xml sort then doing a diff. Being that you are on linux, this should work for you cleanly. It worked for me on my mac, and should work for people on windows if they have something like cygwin installed:

$ xmllint --c14n a.xml > sortedA.xml
$ xmllint --c14n b.xml > sortedB.xml
$ diff sortedA.xml sortedB.xml