I found some instructions on how to show/hide differences in comments using beyond compare. However most of the answers show how to set comment as important text or not. That is, if a portion of code is commented on both sides then check if the comment are different or not.
I would like to ignore when only one side of the comparison is commented. In other words if I have
# # line1
# line2
on one side and
# line1
line2
I would like both lines to be marked as "unimportant differences" (if indeed the text is the same, otherwise to be marked as differences).
Beyond Compare will only compare text if it is of the same grammar element type. If one side is regular code and the other side is a comment, it will always mark it as an important difference.
To make regular text on one side and the same text commented on the other side show as a match, you'll need to edit the definition of a comment in the file format.
To edit a format, open Tools > File Formats.
Select the format that matches your files.
Go to the Grammar tab.
Select the Comment grammar element, which might be defined as # to end of line.
Click the Edit (gear) button.
Set the Category radio button to Basic.
Text matching: ^#\s
Check Regular expression.
Click OK, then Save.
The updated file format will treat # followed by a whitespace character as an unimportant comment, the remaining text in the line will be treated as regular text and compared to the other side.
Related
I have this little challenge.
I want to ask, how do i sort the emails using the color code (light green) as stated in this picture here
I have tried to remove the non emails by scrolling through, but i need a solution that can make it a one click through sorting.
I will appreciate your kind response.
Open the Replace dialog box and enter the following regex in the Find field:
^((.*#[^\.]*)|([^#]+))$\n
Change the radio button to Regular Expressions. This regex pattern finds any line without a dot after # or any line without a #. Note that you need the last line of the document to be empty as shown in line 7 of your document.
Since we are deleting those lines, the "Replace with" field is blank. Now click Replace All.
I'm using data merge to import two variables per line, and have checked the "Remove blank lines for empty fields" box. The result is a wealth of extra characters that I can't remove using find-and-replace. Of the 24 lines of variables, typically only three contain text, so the other 21 should be empty lines and be deleted by the "Remove blank lines" option.
Attempting to paste these characters into the "find and replace" field, I see
^|^|^|^|^|^|^|^|^|^|^|^|^|^|
Any suggestions? Thanks
Try doing a regular text find/change.
In the Find What field, type < FEFF > (but delete the spaces before and after those angle brackets – the Stack Overflow editor seems to delete this if there are no spaces).
In the Change To, leave blank, and click change all.
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:
However, if I do a hex compare of the same, I get the following result:
I can see it's somehow gotten the EF BB BF at the starting and the Beyond Compare notes this difference with a red bar in the left side window.
On other occasions, I've seen files in 'Pending Changes' with 0d0a at the end which is apparently for a newline character but again Beyond Compare doesn't show this as a difference in Text Compare (I've seen Git GUi show it as a difference in the past).
How can I get Beyond Compare to ignore changes like these that don't show up in the Text Compare when it considers a particular file as a 'pending change' so I don't see it in the 'Pending Changes' window in the first place?
OR, if that's not at all possible,
How can I get Beyond Compare to show these changes in the default text compare so I can undo them easily?
To make the extra newline character show as a difference in the Text Compare:
Click the Rules toolbar button (referee icon).
In the Importance tab, check Compare line endings (PC/Mac/Unix).
To make it the default for new Text Compare sessions, change the dropdown from Use for this view only to Also update session defaults before you click OK.
If you turn on View > Visible Whitespace, the extra newline character will show as a red difference. When this setting is on, it will also show Windows style newline on one side and Unix style newline on the other side as a difference.
As AdrianHHH said, the EF BB BF is a UTF-8 byte order mark. It isn't possible to add or remove a BOM in the Text Compare. In the Hex Compare, it is possible to delete the BOM from a file.
Very close to reverse of this question. I prefer coding with 2-whitespace indentation, but need to have files indented with tabs to align with project convention. What I would like to do is preferably automatically convert 2 spaces upon entry to tab symbol in Notepad++ and have the editor configured to tab length of 2.
A possible manual way for doing this could be Edit->Blank Operations->Space to TAB but this converts all of my spaces to tabs, even those of length 1 - which are, for example, spaces between function arguments, not just leading spaces.
In a perfect case scenario I'm trying to achieve formatting style as described in this question, but with typing just spaces and the editor taking care of the rest.
I'm on Notepad++ 6.0, but willing to upgrade if this helps
Let me complete the answer of Ari Okkonen to add a workaround to the problem commented by Sergii Zaskaleta of mixed tabs and spaces at the beginning of the line.
Settings->Preferences->Tab Settings->Tab size: 2 (if not already)
Edit->Blank Operations->Space to TAB (Leading)
Select a block of lines of text with the problem of mixed spaces and tabs. Press [Tab] and [Shift]+[Tab] to add and remove a tab from each line. In the process, the leading spaces had been converted to tabs.
A manual way that seems to work: After having edited the file before saving you may try (Works in Notepad++ v6.8.3):
Settings->Preferences->Tab Settings->Tab size: 2 (if not already)
Edit->Blank Operations->Space to TAB (Leading)
I would expect that Beyond Compare would ignore differences based on tabs vs spaces if in the Session Settings/Importance Tab, I check the boxes labeled Leading Whitespace and Embedded Whitespace while comparing text files using the default format. Neither checked nor unchecked causes those differences to be ignored.
What am I missing?
The checkboxes there are controlling what's important to the comparison. Whitespace will be important if they're checked and unimportant if they're unchecked. They do only affect text that doesn't match something else in the grammar though. If you're comparing C++ code, for example, and the whitespace occurs at the end of a comment line it will be classified as a comment instead.
Assuming it's classified as "unimportant" correctly, BC will still show it as a difference, but will show it in blue rather than red. You can hide unimportant differences using the View->Ignore Unimportant Differences menu item, which will make them appear using the matching coloring and filter as such.
If you're still having trouble you'll have better luck getting support if you email support#scootersoftware.com or post in our support forums at http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbulletin/ with a bit more information.
Go to: Tools -> File formats -> Grammar. Add a grammar item (the +) and then mark the Regular expression check box.
There you can add a regex matching the items you want and define the severity of them.
In general, this is very useful when you have some differences that are not important to you.