__LINK__ Download Text Compare
Sixta Strissel
My problem is twofold. I'm using Beyond Compare integrated with Visual Studio 2015 as my Compare/Merge tool. While looking at my list of 'Pending Changes', I see a file which if I 'Right Click -> Source Control -> Compare with Latest Version', I can see no differences in the text compare as you can see below:
I have two text files and want to find the differences between them using Windows Powershell. Is there something similar to the Unix diff tool available? Or is there another other way I haven't considered?
Figured it out myself. Because Powershell works with .net objects rather than text, you need to use get-content to expose the contents of the text files. So to perform what I was trying to do in the question, use:
compare-object (aka diff alias) is pathetic if you expect it to behave something like a unix diff. I tried the diff (gc file1) (gc file2), and if a line is too long, I can't see the actual diff and more importantly, I can't tell which line number the diff is on.
My advice, don't use powershell to find differences in files. As someone else noted, fc works, and works a little better than compare-object, and even better is downloading and using real tools like the unix emulator that Mikeage mentioned.
fc.exe is better for text comparing since it designed to work like *nix diff, i.e. compares lines sequentially, showing the actual differences and trying to re-synchronise (if the differing sections have different lengths). It also has some useful control options (text/binary, case sensitivity, line numbers, resynchronisation length, mismatch buffer size) and provides exit status (-1 bad syntax, 0 files same, 1 files differ, 2 file missing). Being a (very) old DOS utility, it does have a few limitations. Most notably, it does not automatically work with Unicode, treating the 0 MSB of ASCII characters as a line terminator so the file becomes a sequence of 1 character lines (@kennycoc: use the /U option to specify BOTH files are Unicode, WinXP onwards) and it also has a hard line buffer size of 128 characters (128 bytes ASCII, 256 bytes Unicode) so long lines get split up and compared separately.
compare-object is designed to determine if 2 objects are member-wise identical. if the objects are collections then they are treated as SETS (see help compare-object), i.e. UNORDERED collections without duplicates. 2 sets are equal if they have the same member items irrespective of order or duplications. This severely limits its usefulness for comparing text files for differences. Firstly, the default behaviour collects the differences until the entire object (file = array of strings) has been checked thus losing the information regarding the position of the differences and obscuring which differences are paired (and there is no concept of line number for a SET of strings). Using -synchwindow 0 will cause the differences to be emitted as they occur but stops it from trying to re-synchronise so if one file has an extra line then subsequent line comparisons can fail even though the files are otherwise identical (until there is a compensatory extra line in the other file thereby realigning the matching lines). However, powershell is extremely versatile and a useful file compare can be done by utilising this functionality, albeit at the cost of substantial complexity and with some restrictions upon the content of the files. If you need to compare text files with long (> 127 character) lines and where the lines mostly match 1:1 (some changes in lines between files but no duplications within a file such as a text listing of database records having a key field) then by adding information to each line indicating in which file it is, its position within that file and then ignoring the added information during comparison (but including it in the output) you can get a *nix diff like output as follows (alias abbreviations used):
If you don't necessarily care what is different about the files and just want to know if they are different then I find that using Get-FileHash on each file and then comparing the two hashes is the most efficient way to do this. It's mostly useful when you have to compare a lot of files between two locations for differences.
I realize this might involve a lot of reworking depending on how the app is made but some things are impossible to do without text comparison (like sorting text) and other actions require unnecessary repetitive conditions.
I understand, text/strings are used in a lot of places. As a starter or compromise modifying or or adding a condition to check two strings using all of the operators would be an excellent helper. I could do a lot with string
I could still make it for myself. Also, the text list parameter would be very close to an operator or operand list. I could add the various symbols. Although, it would also allow other characters. So maybe not beneficial as a public extension.
Perhaps C6 has some weird formatting applied to it? For example the number 0 could formatted to appear as Shot, so while C6 is printed as Shot, the value of C6 could still be 0 and while printed as Shot, it would not match Shot when compared using EXACT().
Text is text and is not converted to ASCII value so A+1 will become A1 and due to the fact that the loop is expecting a number it will fail an nothing will get executed inside the loop block.
My first time posting a question and also very new to Retool!
I have a database of subscribers whose membership expires at the end of a year. I want to have a text box which shows if they are 'Past' or 'Current' members whenever they are selected. I know the year their membership expires as it is the first two characters of their membership number and I want to compare those characters to the current year to determine if the member is current or past members and display that a the text box. I can't seem to find a way to achieve this so any help would be welcome.
I would recommend writing some Javascript code to solve this case. You could use a Javascript transformer or you could put the code right in the text box config (You can put Javascript code inside of )
Does anyone know if there is a text comparison app that works with VoiceOver? I used to use Beyond Compare which I loved but it's not at all accessible. I also try PyCharm's built-in comparison but I can't find a way to know what the differences are.
I recall subversion (version control system) had a built-in GUI file compare tool that let you pick changes from one version or another to incorporate into the current version. Even as a sighted person, it was clumsy to use. If all I had to do was select a code snippet from one file or another, it was probably fine. But I usually had to make some alterations after selecting the snippet, and I resented being in subversion's GUI editor while doing that. I wanted to be in my own editor.
Finding the differences between two blocks of text is a fundamental task. What alterations has another author or editor made to your document? How does one very long Excel formula differ from another at the character level? Note that Excel formulae need to be temporarily single quoted first before this Office add-in will fetch them (e.g. '=6*7 rather than =6*7) or directly copied into the add-in.
Sometimes you just want to compare two regions of text that are in the same document or workbook. Or that you can quickly copy to your clipboard. Maybe you don't want to have to create new files, fire up an external application and navigate to the right directory.
Selection Diff Tool is intended to be at hand for when you just want to quickly compare two regions of plain text via selections or direct clipboard copying. It does not compare colors, styles, charts, tables or graphs.
For Excel, the add-in can fetch both single and multiple cell selections, so long as the latter are contiguous. Multiple cell selections obtained by clicking a row or column header such as A, B, C, 1, 2 3 do not work. However there is a workaround. Simply copy the whole row or column to the clipboard via ctrl-c and then paste it into one of the two text boxes via ctrl-v. Manually copying (ctrl-c) and pasting (ctrl-v) into the two text boxes always works.
You could also just print out your data to the console and see what it is/was. Just as easy to put two inputs attributes to compare. One benefit of verifyMatch is it prints out BOTH strings within the report so you can verify what you have/had.
Meld is nice tool. Specialized to file compare. Meld itself is 2 times bigger than whole PSPad itself. I can say, PSPad never be as good as Mled in file compare.
But I can take a look if is possible to call meld with two files as parameter.
It can be possible, as I see: meldmerge.org
notepad++ went another way with their plugin. It shows both files in their own editor windows side by side while it is showing the compare result and the normal editor functions exist in both windows. But it only shows that a line is different or missing. It doesn't show what is different within a line.
I guess it would be easiest for you if you would
- somewhere allow to define an external tool for merging.
- allow a shortcut to be set to call the merger tool, or a button in the text diff view/tab.
- update the content of the files automatically when the tool is done, or at least ask.
I guess better will be use MELD or any other external Compare tool. I will add possibility to configure external tool in PSPad.
If external compare tool will be set, PSPad will call external tool directly instead of the internal TextDiff
Question: Is there a way in which I can compare text in Coda? For example, if I have three paragraphs on the left and three paragraphs on the right, is there a tool or formula that would allow me to see which are the differences between the two texts?
A quick way to compare a load of text at a glance used to be to just highlight the text in one document and then drag it to another. The dragged text stayed visible while you dragged so you could overlay it on the other text and it would make any differences immediately obvious.
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