Show White Space Characters

[rnh349]

When I select the Show White Space characters I see << at the beginning of some lines. However if I specify Blank Lines as unimportant text in my rules these characters and lines are still displayed.

The files are being compared via a mapped drive to a VMS system and that definitely has something to do with this issue. If I FTP to the VMS server and do a comparison I do not experience this behavior. The actual files do not even have these (<<) blank lines I am talking about?

Thanks

[Chris]

Re: Show White Space Characters

The >> when whitespace is visible indicates a tab character.

If you set blank lines as unimportant, it will ignore lines that only contain unimportant text. It sounds like whitespace is important in your comparison rules, so that lines are showing as a difference.

Select Tools|Edit Current Rules and check "Leading whitespace".

This will make leading tabs or spaces unimportant so the lines shouldn't show as a difference.

[Guest]

Re: Show White Space Characters

Chris,
The characters I am seeing are not greater than signs as you have indicated to mean tabs (>>) but are less than signs (<<). I have tried several variations with the whitespace options and have not been successful in eliminating them when Ignoring Unimportant Differences.

[Chris]

Re: Show White Space Characters

The << might be a non text value in the file, I'm not sure what it corrsponds to. If you open the files in Beyond Compare's Hex Viewer, what is the hex value of the << character?

If you can figure out what the hex value of the character is, you can use the regular expression \xnn to ignore the hex code nn in a file.