Line comparison reports an 'incorrect' difference

[Guest]

Hello,

I am comparing the following two lines to each other. I would like to mark part of the left-side line as being unimportant to the comparision. In particular the string (SERVERNAME ="smpetld02") should be unimportant for my comparison purposes. I've added a regular expression (SERVERNAME ="\w+") to my list of unimportant text rules. This appears to eliminate the above string from the comparison, but Beyond Compare still identifies a difference between the lines beginning at SUSPEND_ON_ERROR. It appears to me that even though I indicate that a substring within a line as being unimportant, BC does not take that into account when aligning the line content for comparison

Steps to reproduce

1. Left Side Line: <WORKFLOW NAME ="wf_ONR_ST_Triple_Contr_Nr" DESCRIPTION ="" ISENABLED ="YES" ISRUNNABLESERVICE ="NO" ISSERVICE ="NO" ISVALID ="YES" REUSABLE_SCHEDULER ="NO" SCHEDULERNAME ="Scheduler" SERVERNAME ="smpetld02" SUSPEND_ON_ERROR ="NO" TASKS_MUST_RUN_ON_SERVER ="NO" VERSIONNUMBER ="1">

2. Right Side Line: <WORKFLOW NAME ="wf_ONR_ST_Triple_Contr_Nr" DESCRIPTION ="" ISENABLED ="YES" ISRUNNABLESERVICE ="NO" ISSERVICE ="NO" ISVALID ="YES" REUSABLE_SCHEDULER ="NO" SCHEDULERNAME ="Scheduler" SUSPEND_ON_ERROR ="NO" TASKS_MUST_RUN_ON_SERVER ="NO" VERSIONNUMBER ="1">

3. Note that BC reports a difference starting at: SERVERNAME

4. Add Rule for unimportant text - Regular Expression: SERVERNAME ="\w+"

5. Note that BC now reports a difference starting at: SUSPEND_ON_ERROR

Am I missing something, or is there something else I could do to make the lines compare identically from an 'unimportant text' perspective?

Also FWIW, as a developer, BC is one of the few tools that I can not live without. Congratulations on a truely excellent product at an affordable price. I work for a large company here in Madison and am attempting to evangelize your product to bring it in-house. It pays for itself in the first half-hour of use!

Thanks, SteveB

[Guest]

Re: Line comparison reports an \'incorrect\' difference

Also FWIW, as a developer, BC is one of the few tools that I can not live without. Congratulations on a truely excellent product at an affordable price. I work for a large company here in Madison and am attempting to evangelize your product to bring it in-house. It pays for itself in the first half-hour of use!

I think we all feel the same. Our company buys licences for new developers joining the company automatically, and once they have used it, they cannot live without BC!! Truely awesome product, and a very reasonable price.

Our company has spent considerably more money on software that comes nowhere near as good as BC.

[Chris]

Re: Line comparison reports an \'incorrect\' differe

Hi SteveB,

Do you have whitespace differences marked as unimportant?

If you don't, there is an extra whitespace character after the SERVERNAME ="smpetld02" that will be marked different.

If you add a space at the end of your regular expression, it should ignore the extra whitespace character. To see the whitespace differences, select View|Show Whitespace.

Even with the regular expression change, the first letter S in the following SUSPEND_ON_ERROR will be colored red. This is actually a bug in BC, and we're working to get it fixed. Even though the S shows red, the line no longer contains a difference so it should be hidden if you select to only display differences.

[Guest]

Re: Line comparison reports an \'incorrect\' differe

Chris,

Thanks for the help! It was the extra trailing whitespace char that was causing the difference.

Steve