Stringdiff unit 1.0
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by Barry Brannan, September 1997.
mailto: barrylb@poboxes.com
http://www.poboxes.com/barrylb

Bug reports, suggestions welcome. If you make any improvements I would
appreciate if you sent them to me.

The code is released into the public domain.

See my homepage for updates and other useful Delphi stuff.


CONTENTS
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The stringdiff unit has these functions:


* computeDiff(blocksize, original, second)  -->  diffmap
  
  Compare original string and second string and compute a "difference map" 
  between the two strings.

* extractDiff(original, diffmap)  -->  second

  Use original string and difference map and produce second string. Reverse of computeDiff

* dumpDifference(diffmap)  -->  string illustrating diffmap

  Illustrates diffmap as text


WHY
---

Suppose you are downloading pages of data from an online service at regular
intervals. Rather than saving whole snapshots of the data each time, you
save the first page then save "difference maps" for each update. If the
pages don't change much then you have huge gains in storage efficency.



A FEW WORDS
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Would you like to have a warm fuzzy feeling ??? If you have written any useful 
routines/components then please share them!!  If you, like me, have found useful 
components written by other people, then why not play your part?


