

Note that comparisons must be made among the same file type. or to validate a package of files is in compliance with standards before publishing. For instance, this might be to detect problems with corrupted backup versions of a collection of files. However, it also may include comparisons between two populations of files, such as in the case of comparing directories or folders, as part of file management. This category of software tool is often called "file comparison" or "diff tool", but those effectively are equivalent terms - where the term "diff" is more commonly associated with the Unix diff utility.Ī typical rudimentary case is the comparison of one file against another. The file types addressed by individual file comparison apps varies, but may include text, symbols, images, audio, or video. (I actually just answered a question earlier today on that same concept.)Īpply it to different files with a different number of lines.This article compares computer software tools which are used for accomplishing comparisons of files of various types. Your two options inside Notepad++ are using the Column Editor like you’ve already discovered, or using a scripting plugin like PythonScript and using the full power of a programming language to influence the text in the open file. Regular expressions cannot count (they have no concept of “increment a number”). Is there a regex to add the line number in multiple places in the line? > Delimiter > Word character listīest said in I want to compare two files and bookmark the lines containing similar words: If you want to modify or add other characters to be considered as words, just go to Settings > Preferences. And a word character represents any single letter, accentuated letter, digit or the _ character. If you prefer to search identical words, whatever their case, change the beginning of the regex from (?s-i) to (?si)īy default, the part \b(\w+)\b looks for the greatest range of word characters, between 2 non-word chars.

Here is a general solution which marks every word of File 1 ONLY IF this specific word is also present in File 2 :
