What is the code structure that follows #diff in the URL?

[niravbhuva99]

Select Topic Area

Question

Body

Example:

Consider the following URL that highlights changes in a pull request:

https://github.com/{owner}/{repo}/pull/{pull_request}/files#diff-{sha}

https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/28990/files#diff-e6912f3a0bbb760244dd03f6565f02b6c7e7de75656636a13370eb71164f9337

I'm uncertain about the code structure that follows #diff-{sha} and its functionality.

Question:

What is the code structure that follows #diff in the URL, and how is it generated?

[CopperEagle]

Hey @niravbhuva99

Github relies on SHA codes to uniquely identify an object. Object here really means anything represented as bytes - like the output from diff. (This is a tool which returns the changes between two files, code snippets, etc.) So an object here could be a commit, etc. Github states here they use shortened SHA codes for this. Why SHA? It provides cryptographic strength in that it should be extremely unlikely, that two different objects will end up having the same code ("collision").

You can generate such checksums (codes) for a given file for yourself. If you are on Linux, check out sha256sum. You can also use a website for this.

Hope this answers your question.

[LangLangBart]

and how is it generated?

Related: #55764

[niravbhuva99]

@CopperEagle @LangLangBart Thank you for providing this solution, it worked perfectly!