Comparing two text files

Tonight's tip comes courtesy of Ty Landercasper, Jean-Sebastien Leroy, and Pavel Nedev who have designed the Compare Plug-in for NotePad ++. The Compare plug-in allows you to detect if there any differences in the displayable characters of two different text files.

NotePad ++ has a Plugins menu from which a separate Plugin Manager can be installed. Do this and then follow the prompt to restart NotePad ++.

Open two text files that you want to compare. Go back to the Plugin menu and simply select Compare . . . Compare.

NotePad ++ will show the two files side by side and highlight differences in red. You can move between the discrepancies by clicking on the blue arrows on the right of the tool bar.

Removing Duplicates in NotePad ++

Back on October 19, 2015, the Tip of the Night described a method to dedupe strings in a column of text using a RegEx search in NotePad ++. Here's an alternative method to use in NotePad ++ which doesn't require running a RegeEx. Catherine Wilhelm send posted the following solution on her blog.

Paste the column of data you want to dedupe in NotePad ++. Press CTRL + A to select all of the data. Then in the TextFX . . . TextFX Tools menu confirm that that T: +Sort outputs only UNIQUE (at column) lines is checked off.

Then simply click on T: Sort lines case insensitive (at column), and you'll get a column of deduped strings.

Filtering Text in Notepad ++

Note that the TextFX plugin for NotePad ++ profiled in the Tip of the Night for July 16, 2016 can also be used to filter text as well. Copy text onto your clipboard . . .

. . . and then go to the TextFX menu and select . . . TextFX Viz . . . Show Lines with (clipboard) text.