Compare different file types

[Hensz]

Hi there!

I don't know if this is already supported, but I doubt it. It would be great if TCs Synchronize Dirs command and the Compare By Content command could compare file types using plug-ins. TC makes a file type detection: Text files are compared different than binary files.

I work a lot with DBF files (Visual FoxPro or DBase files). I haven't found a reasonable good compare tool for DBF, and the TC compare tool is only helpful if the files are equal (I can ignore the date and time fields by brain).

Other possible compare plug-ins could be: OpenOffice documents, CSV (comparing only certain columns), different text comparators, HDF5 (an open format for scientific data) and even MS Office files.

Best regards, hensz

[ghisler(Author)]

Well, since compare plugins would be EXTREMELY complex, there wouldn't be a real benefit compared to a dedicated external compare tool. You can call such a tool via a button or hotkey already.

[StatusQuo]

2ghisler(Author)

Well, since compare plugins would be EXTREMELY complex

The TextSearch-Plugin has an interesting way to handle this:
using external tools to convert (RTF/DOC/PDF/...) into plain text,
which then could be compared with TC's existing compare function.

Synchronizing/changing the files would not be possible like this, but compare could be.

[Lefteous]

That's not a feature of the textsearch plug-in but of all content plug-in which support fields of type fulltext.

I have already suggested this limited but still very useful approach some time ago:
http://www.ghisler.ch/wiki/index.php?title=Use_internal_Lister_for_converted_text_files&action=history

It could be used in many places like Lister, compare by contents or find files.

[ghisler(Author)]

Unfortunately such a solution wouldn't be that useful. For example, when you compare two Word documents, it would only detect changes in the text, but not when a user changed certain parts of the text from bold to italic. It couldn't be used for all types of data either. For example, xml files have a very special structure, which couldn't be compared simply as text.

[Lefteous]

2ghisler(Author)
I still think that would be much better than just beeing unable to compare two files at all.

There is also another possible way to compare files - using Lister plug-ins. This way formattings could be kept and a trre structure as in xml could be displayed.

I think both ways would be a great enhancement. It just depends on what plug-ins are available.

[Motorocker]

[REQ] Content plugins in Compare Tool
Using content plugins you can compare any files.

This idea was supported.