Diffing two account files

[AC]

On 2015-08-13 02:12, John Ralls wrote:
> 
>> On Aug 13, 2015, at 6:33 AM, Plutocrat <plutocrat at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> AC wrote on Thursday, 13 August, 2015 11:32 AM:
>>> Is it possible to generate some kind of difference output between a data
>>> file and one of its backups?  I'm trying to find an entry error and it
>>> would be ideal if I could make a diff.
>>
>> If you're not saving to an SQL database backend, then the files are in XML format, either plain or gzipped. So yes, xml can be diffed. 
> 
> Note that GnuCash isn’t careful about keeping things in the same order from one save to the next so you’ll get a bunch of diffs just because of that. 
> 

Let's try that again except to the list:

That's exactly what I was afraid of, order not preserved which makes
tracking down the change very difficult.


So diffing the XML is out.  Is there a document somewhere that describes
the format of the data contained in the log files?