"Clean" Export of Differences?

[JohnBooty]

Apologies for posting this in "General Discussion" - it spans Folder/2Way/3Way comparisons, so I didn't want to pigeonhole it to one of them.

As a programmer, I'm extremely impressed with BeyondCompare and we've bought several licenses.

Here's my question: is there a way to do a "clean" export of the differences between files? Not a diff; just a clean .CSV/.XLS/etc export for people that are non-technical personnel. We have a number of nontechnical people in our company that could really use something like this. They work with mailing lists and need a way to extract the changes between list revisions.

Example...

FileA.csv

  1000, Aaron
  1001, Bob
  1002, Chris
  1004, Erin

FileB.csv

  1000, Aaron
  1001, Bob
  1002, Chris
  1003, Dolores
  1004, Edward

We'd like to export just the changed rows to... "ChangesInFileB.csv"

  1003, Dolores
  1004, Edward

[Aaron]

Hello,

All of our "reports" are formatted in some way or another. The easiest "clean" export would be to use our Display Filters to Show Differences, then use Select All, Copy, and Paste into a Text Editor (or BC3's Tools menu -> Text Edit). How does this work for you?

Display Filters can be further customized by switching to Toggles mode, if you need more control over which lines are shown.

[JohnBooty]

Thank you for the incredibly fast reply!

I'm not sure if that's going to work for us. It's not difficult for me but I have a feeling our non-techie folks are going to be confused. I apologize, because I realize you're targeting a slightly-more-technical-than-the-average-Joe audience.

One thing I noticed is the method you described produces a tab-delimited set of results when I copy-and-paste into a text editor. This is despite the fact that the original files were both CSV, not tab-delimited. Not a dealbreaker for me personally, but I think it's going to confuse our people.

Any way this could be automated? Command-line options, AutoHotKey, internal scripting, plugins, etc?

The interface and core functionality of Beyond Compare are great, and none of your competitors (that I've seen) have the ability to do "clean" exports out-of-the-box either. If I'm going to customize/script something, Beyond Compare would be my first choice.

[Aaron]

Hello John,

Were you opening the CSV files in our Data Compare session type (Default) or the Text Compare session type? In the Text Compare, you can enable Show Whitespace to see which characters are used. For Excel files we have a conversion which would insert tabs, but there shouldn't be a conversion for plain CSV files.

We don't have an automated method to do this, unfortunately; only the Select, Copy, Paste method. It is on our Customer Wishlist to have CSV as one of our report output types, but isn't supported in the current version.

You could try setting up a Saved Session which points to a specific pair of files and already has the display filters setup to only show Differences. Users could then load this session, and perform the Select All, Copy commands.

[rdclk23]

John, please see my posting on http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbull...ead.php?t=8374 Maybe there is a way to automate it using an Excel macro and a BC3 macro.