Ignoring carriage-return in text compare

[Aaron]

BC3 can ignore the carriage return character itself, but not text lines that are spread across multiple lines (an inserted line break).

[bobsmells]

No brainer

Yep, I just bought a license half an hour ago and was unpleasantly surprised to see that this feature hadn't yet been implemented. It's 2014 and although yes I can see that we all think our own desperately needed feature is the one everyone wants but come on this is surely at the top of the list for most people.

[Aaron]

Hello,

It is one feature we are certainly aware of, but we have limited development resources split between new features and bug fixes. Bringing BC4 to all 3 platforms has been a very large project. Tackling this feature is on our radar, but is itself also a large project.

We certainly don't want a user to be surprised by the capabilities of what they're purchasing. We try to provide as easy a trial (no registration, fully featured, time limit only counts down days you actually use) and are available if you have any questions before purchase. If our current feature set is not going to be able to meet your needs, please contact us at [email protected] with a link back to this forum thread for our reference.

[diegocr]

Any news on this feature? the changelogs around BC4 were so long that perhaps i missed that's possible already and dunno how to do it

And as pointed, it isn't just ignoring CR/LF, but rather CR/LF+SP.. spread across multiple lines.

For example:

if (foo) call();

Vs:

if (foo)
call();

Or even better, Vs:

if (foo) {
call();
}

Under the Rules/SessionSettings->Importance i did tried to add the regex "\n\s+" as Unimportant text, but that doesn't seem to work

[Aaron]

Hello,

The compare still consider line breaks important, and differences across multiple lines would be compared line by aligned line. In cases like this, code tidying can help. We have a few conversions on our download page for Java Tided, HTML Tidied, and XML Tidied, which reformat the syntax to match for the comparison. If you are familiar with another command line tool, we can plug into it following this guide:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/suppo...rnalconversion

Adding the ability to compare items across line breaks is still on our wishlist.

[sambartle]

I'm guessing this still isn't possible? I've spent about 10 minutes trying to get it to work this afternoon.. and had zero success.

In my eyes (long time user - recent poster) this is the number one missing feature.. Id rather have this than all the image compare stuff for sure..

I'm assuming its tricky to implement otherwise we would surely have seen it in the 8 years this has been a requested feature..

[gamebm]

+1 to request this feature.

[Aaron]

Thanks, Sam.

And true: it's been on our wishlist a long time and is quite the tricky feature to tackle. Part of why we can load very large files quickly while also showing the content as it loads is because of the line by line comparison method. This feature requires a whole new approach and is a very large project to tackle. It's also one frequently requested, so it's still on our radar (despite not being able to do it yet), but we wouldn't be able to commit to a timeframe.

But I did +1 our tracker entry on the subject with a couple more notes.