References & Sources

Why We Publish References

Our tools are built on well-established computer-science algorithms and published file-format specifications. We list our primary references here so you can verify our approach and learn more about the underlying technology.

Diff & Comparison Algorithms

• Myers, E. W. (1986). An O(ND) Difference Algorithm and Its Variations. Algorithmica — the foundational algorithm behind most modern line-diff tools.
• Hunt, J. W., & McIlroy, M. D. (1976). An Algorithm for Differential File Comparison. Bell Laboratories — the basis of the classic Unix diff utility.
• Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) problem — overview. Our browser-side text comparison uses an LCS approach for word- and character-level diffing.

File-Format Specifications

• PDF 32000-1:2008 (ISO) — the PDF specification underpinning our text extraction.
• ECMA-376 (Office Open XML) — the standard for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.
• RFC 8259 — the JSON data interchange format.
• W3C XML 1.0 — the Extensible Markup Language specification.

Standards & Best Practices

• RFC 7231 (HTTP/1.1 Semantics) — informs our API response comparison, including status codes and headers.
• Google Search — Creating Helpful Content — guides our educational content standards.
• OWASP Top Ten — informs the security practices used when handling uploaded files and fetching remote URLs.

How to Cite This Site

If you reference Compares-Text in your own work, you can cite it as: