This is a flexible class for comparing pairs of sequences of any type, so long as the sequence elements are hashable. The basic algorithm predates, and is a little fancier than, an algorithm published in the late 1980’s by Ratcliff and Obershelp under the hyperbolic name “gestalt pattern matching.” The idea is to find the longest contiguous matching subsequence that contains no “junk” elements; these “junk” elements are ones that are uninteresting in some sense, such as blank lines or whitespace. (Handling junk is an extension to the Ratcliff and Obershelp algorithm.) The same idea is then app
class difflib.SequenceMatcher