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Comparing delmited text files?

Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 8:25 pm
by mmorrell
Does Compare It have the ability to compare two flat, delmited files?

Similar to a comma delmited files, we have files delimited by "\" characters. These do not compare well because records may not be the same length if only one field is different. We do not need to compare some fields and could care less if they are different. Therefore, we cannot use specific characters to ignore differences on since each record is a different length. For example, field 7 may start at postion 21 on one record and postion 30 on the next. But fields 7 is always the 7th delimited field.

Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 9:56 am
by grigsoft
No, unfortunately there is no currently specific support for delimited files. One of possible solutions for your case could be writing some reformatting filter, which would align columns by content, like current xls handling. But in this case you will lose ability to edit files.
It also should be possible to ignore specific fields by using RegExps - it requires some mess with configuration, but if you could send me at least few lines from your files, I will try to help you with this. It's possible to extract only specific columns from delimited file for comparison.