Can I force interleaving when comparing sorted files?

[Lazlo Nibble]

Is there a way to compare two sorted files, with "never align differences" turned on, and force them to align/interleave between the right and left comparison panes in sort order? In other words, I never want to see a value in one pane that's LOWER than any value on the same row in the other pane.

When comparing large sorted files (my current example being a comparison of a 26Mb / 658k line file with a 6Mb / 200k line file), the comparison always eventually gets to the point where it loses alignment and the comparison ends with "all the rest of the left file" in the left pane followed by "all the rest of the right file" in the right pane:

YY-
YZ-
ZJ-
ZZ-
  -WX
  -XB
  -ZA
  -ZY

What I want to see is:

  -WX
  -XB
YY-
YZ-
  -ZA
ZJ-
  -ZY
ZZ-

...regardless of whether or not there are any actual matching lines in the files for the alignment algorithm to latch onto.

Is there any way to do this today? If not, I'd like to request it for a future release.

[Chris]

It isn't possible to do this in the BC3 Text Compare. Some times it can help to select "Alternate method" in the Alignment tab of Session > Session Settings.

It depends on what kind of files you're comparing, but you might get better results using the Data Compare if you're comparing delimited data files or files with a single entry on each line that need to be sorted. The Data Compare will sort based on key fields so it can produce better results for data files.