Side by Side: Health Care Bills

March 19, 2010 6:24 PM

Side by Side: Health Care Bills
For work we ran a side by side diff of the Senate and House Reconciled versions of the health care reform bill, so that everyone can view the actual changes to the bill under the "Deem and Pass" scheme.

Under the hood it uses the unix diff utility, and the actual diff class is over on github (for the nerdy).

posted by Jeff_Larson (5 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by cjorgensen on March 25, 2010: Cause I'm Leavin' on a Jet Plane

I think this is cool. The redraw is annoying, but I guess that's what happens when you get two huge text files side by side.

It was striking how little changed from one to one.

Also, some of the crap that's in there is stupid, but that's the sytem. What does defining what constitutes a bio fule have to do with health care?

Anyway, nice job.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:51 AM on March 22, 2010

Thanks, yeah sorry about the redraw, it's a humongous table, and loading it all crashed firefox, at least for me. As for biofuels, we're looking into it, and we'll keep everyone posted.
posted by Jeff_Larson at 5:43 PM on March 22, 2010

Update on the biofuels.
posted by Jeff_Larson at 9:27 AM on March 23, 2010

Cool. Too bad entire paragraphs are considered "lines".

I wonder if it'd be possible to adapt (somehow) Neil Brown's "wiggle" program (or maybe the word based diff that it uses) to get finer grained diff output.

See wiggle
posted by smcameron at 10:37 PM on March 23, 2010

It's actually pretty easy to do a word-wise diff with the unix diff tool. You just take each of your diff lines and split them on word boundaries and then run a diff on that. That might make it into the next iteration of this thing, but I was already pushing a deadline for this one.
posted by Jeff_Larson at 8:26 AM on March 24, 2010