What's the diff? Sutta comparison tool 🛠

Have you ever struggled to see exactly what the difference was between two suttas? Struggle no more!

For example:
https://diff.readingfaithfully.org/?lang=en&one=AN6.11&two=an6.12

Or for something much longer (which may take a while to load depending on your device)
https://diff.readingfaithfully.org/?lang=en&one=mn10&two=dn22

19 Likes

@Snowbird This is just amazing!!
:pray:t5: :pray:t5:

1 Like

Well, it’s just putting together existing technology. In the readMe I link to the library I used to do the diffing. And, of course, the suttas themselves are coming from the SuttaCentral API.

Much appreciation as always to Bhante @Sujato and his team for all their hard work. And to @Khemarato.bhikkhu for his help and patience with the coding.

5 Likes

That’s awesome. I :heartpulse: diff… :rofl:

I guess it was a bit too tricky to align the columns? That would be perfection…

2 Likes

The diffing library I’m using doesn’t provide for that (as far as I can tell). But anything is possible with code.

My thinking was that either the suttas would be so similar that it wouldn’t matter (assuming simple manual checking [aka eyeballing it] was not turning up the difference) or that they would be so different that aligning the line wouldn’t work.

1 Like

If you could code liberation from suffering, that would be great Bhante. I’m looking forward to ‘Arahant v 1.0’ :wink:

2 Likes

Sorry. Had to fix that. :nerd_face:

2 Likes

:rofl: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

4 Likes

Wow! Just WOW!!!

:+1: :+1:

2 Likes

Yes, your name came up right away when I was discussing this with Ven. Khemarato. This should kick your spotting of inconsistencies up to god like level.

I’m still working on getting other languages to work.

4 Likes

My goodness! And expectations will climb up … :person_climbing:

Well, usually I don’t quite know what I am comparing with. Sometimes I have a vague memory of a different translation of a certain passage, or what the (German) Bilara translation memory shows me differs from what I see in the English translation of the current Sutta—these are things that make me suspicious. But what the translation memory doesn’t show is where these other passages belong to. So I go searching … and my favorite tool is always @karl_lew’s scv-bilara. (Hopefully we’ll one day manage to build a nice user interface for it so that is is easier to use for anybody.)

But surely once my suspicion is concrete enough your new tool can be a great help to pin down the exact differences. :pray:

4 Likes

To come back to that one, just a possible use case:

In your link comparing MN 10 and DN 22, I see this passage:

Screenshot from 2022-10-02 14-29-01

I’d now be interested to know if the Pali in the two Suttas is different here or the same. If it’s the same, that would be a thing to point out to Bhante Sujato as an inconsistency. In order to find that out it would—especially when it comes to long Suttas—be easier if I could see the segment numbers of the two Sutta passages and then compare precisely these segments in Pali.

Is that too hard a coding task?

I would still assume that much is possible, but sometimes the relation between effort and benefit is just not fitting. So I leave that up to you.

I can always find that out by using a different tool, of course.

Again much thanks for all your efforts! :pray:

3 Likes

Ayya @sabbamitta, do you mean besides something like this? Pali text can be activated by menu item at the top.

4 Likes

So, you can also compare the Pali. Do you see the language drop down?

Let me play around with segment numbers and I’ll see what I can do.

4 Likes

The diff tool will be quite helpful to translators. Thank you!
:pray:

3 Likes

Yes, I saw it.

There are actually more differences in the Pali, mostly spelling variants. To find the right segments that I want to compare is not so easy in a long Sutta.

1 Like

This is kind of an unusual case, since normally we won’t be comparing very long suttas like this. Or will we?

1 Like

I don’t know. :smile: I just tried out the link you provided because it was here.

I translate short Suttas and long Suttas, so I compare short Suttas and long Suttas. Sometimes I compare passages of short Suttas with passages in long Suttas. All these cases happen.

But as I said, it’s quite likely that the effort is not worth the benefit. I can usually get the information I need by other means. Actually what I really like is the trilingual view in scv-bilara.

2 Likes