Building a Code Plagiarism Checker with Token Matching

Code plagiarism is a major challenge in computer science education and software development. Standard text-matching tools fail when variables are renamed or code structure is slightly altered. In this course, you will learn how to design and write a robust code plagiarism checker from scratch. You will transition from basic text comparison to advanced syntax-aware analysis, enabling you to identify code similarity with high accuracy even when code has been disguised or reformatted. What you'll learn: - Understand the foundational concepts of lexical analysis and code tokenization - Parse source code into tokens and Abstract Syntax Trees to analyze structure rather than raw text - Apply string-matching and similarity algorithms like Winnowing and Levenshtein distance to code tokens - Design a scalable comparison workflow to evaluate multiple submissions efficiently - Handle modern programming language structures to minimize false positives in common boilerplate code This text-only course begins with core definitions of syntax trees and tokenization before guiding you through the step-by-step logic of token matching and similarity scoring. You will read through clear conceptual explanations and analyze structured code snippets to understand how to build a complete plagiarism detection pipeline. Designed for beginner to intermediate developers and educators, this course requires no prior experience with compiler design. Start reading today to build your own intelligent code comparison engine.