Are my R scripts identical?

Question

I think this must be a duplicate but I can't seem to find the answer on stack. Is there a way to compare two R scripts in the same wd to see if they are identical?

Something like:

a <- source("script1.R")
b <- source("script2.R")

identical(a, b)

I don't just mean the functions in each script but all the other things like comments etc.

Thanks

Answer 1

I made three files (each ending with a newline):

iscript.R

script

iscript2.R

script

niscript.R

not script

Using the md5sum function from tools, I got the hash of :

tools::md5sum(c("iscript.R", "iscript2.R", "niscript.R"))
                         iscript.R                         iscript2.R                         niscript.R 
"95d26f42dccb2ec048a30261e0e2863f" "95d26f42dccb2ec048a30261e0e2863f" "d4bef1be4af7baedd2d69e649feb01d1" 

The files with the same hash are identical.

Answer 2

In case you need to compare two or three scripts side-by-side.

You can use open source software like WinMerge to get a one-to-one visual comparison of the actual text in a script. You will need to save the scripts text files to use as inputs

More info can be found here: https://winmerge.org/downloads/?lang=en

Another alternative is to use SublimeText: Comparing the contents of two files in Sublime Text

Both tools allow you to print diff file to PDF.