v0.6.1 - One last change for 2025

What's Changed

• Adds Brazilian Portuguese translation of README documentation. by @eduardocaetano0 in #80
• fix(docs): Re-add PT-BR translation for README-PT-BR.md by @eduardocaetano0 in #81
• 0.6.1 by @houfu in #82

New Contributors

• @eduardocaetano0 made their first contribution in #80

Full Changelog: v0.6.0...v0.6.1

v0.6.0

🎉 Major Release: AI Agent Optimization & Community Contributions

I'm thrilled to announce Redlines 0.6.0, a significant release that transforms redlines into a powerful tool for AI agents and automation
workflows. This release includes contributions from 8 community contributors during Hacktoberfest 2025!

🤖 Headline Feature: Agent-First Design

Command-Less CLI Invocation

The biggest change in 0.6.0 is the new command-less CLI that outputs JSON by default - the most agent-friendly format:

New in 0.6.0: Just provide two strings or files
redlines "old text" "new text"

Outputs structured JSON automatically
redlines file1.txt file2.txt --pretty

Why this matters:

• AI agents can now invoke redlines with minimal syntax
• JSON output provides complete structural information (tokens, positions, statistics)
• Backward compatible: all existing commands (text, json, markdown, stats) still work

⚠️ Breaking Changes

1. Default CLI Behavior (PR #76)

• Command-less invocation now defaults to JSON output (not text/rich format)
• Impact: If you were relying on implicit behavior, you now need to specify: redlines text "source" "test"
• Migration: All existing commands with explicit format still work exactly as before

2. redlines Property Return Type (PR #63)

• The r.redlines property return type has changed:
  • Before: Returned internal objects (included "equal" operations)
  • After: Returns public Redline dataclass objects (only actual changes)
• Impact: Minimal - r.redlines was primarily used internally. All rendering methods (output_markdown, output_rich, output_json) continue to work
  unchanged.
• Migration: If you were accessing r.redlines directly, update code to handle the new Redline dataclass structure

3. Dependencies

• Added click-default-group>=1.2.4 as a new dependency (automatically installed)
• Dropped support for Python 3.8 and 3.9
• Migrated from Poetry to uv for package management (developers only)

✨ New Features

📊 JSON Output Format (#60, #70)

• Complete machine-readable diff structure with token and character positions
• Comprehensive statistics (deletions, insertions, replacements, change ratios)
• Optional Levenshtein distance support
• Pretty-print option for debugging

🔤 NupunktProcessor - Advanced Tokenization (#73)

Intelligent sentence boundary detection that handles:

• Abbreviations (Dr., Mr., Prof., etc.)
• Decimals and currency ($5.99, 3.14)
• URLs and email addresses
• Legal citations and complex punctuation

  from redlines import Redlines
  from redlines.processor import NupunktProcessor

  processor = NupunktProcessor()
  test = Redlines(
      "Dr. Smith said hello. Mr. Jones replied.",
      "Dr. Smith said hi. Mr. Jones replied.",
      processor=processor
  )

Optional dependency: pip install redlines[nupunkt] (Python 3.11+)

📖 Programmatic Diff API (#63)

New structured access to changes:

• New changes property returns structured Redline dataclass objects
• Filter changes by type: get_changes(operation="replace")
• Direct access to source/test text and positions
• Excludes "equal" operations automatically (only actual changes)

  from redlines import Redlines

  test = Redlines("old text", "new text")

  # Access all changes
  for change in test.changes:
      print(f"{change.operation}: {change.source_text} -> {change.test_text}")

  # Filter by operation type
  replacements = test.get_changes(operation="replace")
  deletions = test.get_changes(operation="delete")

📈 Advanced Statistics (#72)

Contributed by @Kaos599

Comprehensive stats() method with detailed analytics:

• Character-level statistics (chars added/deleted/net change)
• Change size metrics (longest, shortest, average)
• Change ratio calculations
• Optional Levenshtein distance

stats = test.stats()
print(f"Total changes: {stats.total_changes}")
print(f"Change ratio: {stats.change_ratio:.1%}")
print(f"Longest change: {stats.longest_change_length} chars")
print(f"Levenshtein distance: {stats.levenshtein_distance}")

📝 Agent Integration Guide (#76)

New comprehensive documentation specifically for AI agents:

• JSON schema reference
• CLI automation patterns
• Error handling cookbook
• Performance guidelines
• 5 runnable example scripts in examples/

Access via: redlines guide or https://github.com/houfu/redlines/blob/main/AGENT_GUIDE.md

🛠️ Enhanced CLI (#61, #74)

• File input support (not just strings)
• New Explicit JSON and stats commands
• Exit codes for CI/CD integration
• --quiet flag for stats-only output
• Smart TTY detection (helpful tips only in interactive terminals)

🎯 Type Safety (#62)

Contributed by @FallenDeity

• Full mypy type coverage
• Strict type checking enabled
• Better IDE autocomplete and error detection

🙏 Community Contributions

This release was made possible by 8 contributors during Hacktoberfest 2025:

• @FallenDeity (Triyan Mukherjee) - Type safety and mypy coverage
• @Kaos599 (Harsh) - Advanced statistics and analytics
• @abbasabro (Abbas Abro) - Bug fixes and improvements
• @riyadey27 (Riya Dey) - Python version documentation
• @fasfsfgs (Thiago Almeida) - SyntaxWarning fixes
• @TharunK123 (Tharun K) - Testing and validation
• And community testing from multiple contributors!

Thank you all for making redlines better! 🎊

📚 Documentation Updates

• Condensed and modernized README.md (38% reduction in length)
• Added Quick Start sections to README and API docs
• AGENT_GUIDE.md now linked from pdoc documentation
• Fixed inaccurate descriptions ("underlines" → "highlights")
• Updated all examples to reflect JSON-first approach
• Comprehensive benchmarks in demo/ directory

🔧 Technical Improvements

• Migrated from Poetry to uv for faster dependency resolution
• Updated Python support: 3.10 - 3.14 (dropped 3.8, 3.9)
• Improved test coverage with 9 new tests for command-less invocation
• Better error messages and exit codes
• Backward compatibility maintained for all rendering methods

🚀 Upgrade Guide

For CLI Users

  # Old way (still works)
  redlines text "old" "new"

  # New way (simpler, same result)
  redlines "old" "new"

  # If you need text/rich output, specify explicitly
  redlines text "old" "new"

  For Python API Users - output_* methods

  No breaking changes! All existing Python code works exactly as before.

  # All existing code works
  from redlines import Redlines
  test = Redlines("old", "new")
  print(test.output_markdown)  # Still works
  print(test.output_rich)      # Still works

For Python API Users - Using r.redlines property

If you were directly accessing the r.redlines property (rare), update to handle the new Redline dataclass:

  # Old way (0.5.x)
  for item in r.redlines:
      # item was internal DiffOperation object
      pass

  # New way (0.6.0)
  for redline in r.redlines:
      # redline is now a public Redline dataclass
      print(redline.operation)      # "delete", "insert", or "replace"
      print(redline.source_text)    # Text from source
      print(redline.test_text)      # Text from test
      print(redline.source_position)  # Position tuple

For Package Maintainers

• Update minimum dependency: redlines>=0.6.0
• Note new dependency: click-default-group>=1.2.4 (automatically installed)
• Optional dependencies: redlines[nupunkt], redlines[levenshtein]

📦 Installation

  # Standard installation
  pip install redlines

  # With advanced sentence detection (Python 3.11+)
  pip install redlines[nupunkt]

  # With Levenshtein distance support
  pip install redlines[levenshtein]

  # All optional features
  pip install redlines[nupunkt,levenshtein]

Thank you for using redlines! 🦖

v0.5.2

What's Changed

• Normalize tokens by stripping whitespace for comparison by @rickythefox in #45
• Refactor redlines for clarity and maintainability by @houfu in #50
• Project maintenance by @houfu in #49
  • Migration to UV for Dependency Management
    • Replaced Poetry with UV in pyproject.toml, updating dependencies, dev-dependencies, and build system configuration. The build backend was changed from poetry.core.masonry.api to hatchling.build.
    • Updated workflows (docs.yml, python-package.yml, python-publish.yml) to use UV for dependency installation and project setup instead of Poetry
  • GitHub Actions Workflow Updates
  • Documentation and Metadata improvements
    • Updated contact email in CONTRIBUTING.md and Code_of_Conduct.md to <houfu@OUTLOOK dot sg>. Removed references to Matrix chat for community discussions.
    • Removed Matrix chat badge from README.md.
    • Updated copyright in LICENSE.txt to include contributors and extend the range to 2025.

New Contributors 👏 👏 👏

• @rickythefox made their first contribution in #45

Full Changelog: v0.5.1...v0.5.2

v0.5.1

A hotfix to correct a regression for Python 3.8

What's Changed

• Changed type hints from list[str] to List[str] in redlines/processor.py for better consistency with Python's typing module. Closed #42 [Thanks to @servient-ashwin for raising this]
• Extended the supported Python versions in the CI configuration to include Python 3.8 and 3.12 (.github/workflows/python-package.yml).
• Added a new CLI command to output redline comparisons as markdown with various style options (redlines/cli.py).
• New image for Readme.Md etc featuring red-green (the default) output

Full Changelog: v0.5.0...v0.5.1

v0.5

A new year, a new version.
v 0.5 introduces several new enhancements and lays the groundwork for future features.

New Features

• New Markdown styles
  • bbcode (BBCode) (Thanks to new contributor @tharun634 )
  • streamlit
• CLI utility now has a new command simple_text (Thanks to @jeisner for the inspiration)
• redlines.compare now support rich output as an option

The bulk of the change goes towards refactoring the current processing into its own processor: WholeDocumentProcessor.
These changes allow these possibilities in the future:

• Instead of processing all content in a document at once, changes can be generated.
• Processing content can be customized, for example page by page for PDFs.

Other changes

• Improved documentation in several areas -- cli (#38), corrections (#27), redlines-textual, README.md etc
• Added uv
• New tests for new features

Full Changelog: v0.4.2...v0.5

v0.4.2

What's Changed

• Bump to 0.4.1 by @houfu in #25
• Bump to 0.4.2 by @houfu in #26

Full Changelog: v0.4.1...v0.4.2

v0.4.1

What's Changed

• Fix: Update console tests to pass by @houfu in #18
• Feat: Add "ghfm" style by @houfu in #19
• added None to be detected for markdown_style by @RamishKH in #22
• Fix: Add a default test case by @houfu in #23

New Contributors

• @RamishKH made their first contribution in #22

Full Changelog: v0.4.0...v0.4.1

v0.4.0

In this version:

• New command line application by @houfu, resolves #11
• Custom styling by @aaAldinaaa and @houfu
• Updates to docs by @houfu

Much appreciation 👏 to first time contributor @aaAldinaaa and @inteli5 for their assistance in this release.

Your contributions and comments to issues are always welcomed and make it hard for me to ignore this library.

v0.3.0

In this version:

• better handling of newlines by @inteli5
• New workflow, updates to docs and other housekeeping by @houfu

Thanks to @inteli5 first contribution, I felt more compelled to maintain this code. Open source works!
New contributions are always welcomed.