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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Beyond Compare’ Category

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Offline XML Pretty Print

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/12/20

I wrote about [WayBack] XML Pretty Print in Online XML Pretty Print many years ago.

That’s all fine for small XML file and on-line usage.

A while ago however, I had two cases where off-line XML pretty printing turned out to be much easier than online XML pretty printing:

  1. pretty-print many XML files in one go
  2. compare large (100 megabyte plus) XML files

So I went searching, especially for a solution that would be available for both nx based platforms (Linux/Mac OS X/etc) and Windows which got me a few options in [WayBack] unix – How to pretty print XML from the command line? – Stack Overflow.

I found [WayBack] tidy to be more practical than [WayBack] xmllint as tidy would split more lines which made it easier for  Beyond Compare (that is very much cross platform!) to spot and show the differences.

Not just easier in the sense that the (already excellent) diff engine from Beyond Compare (which really sets it apart from other differencing tools) but very much easier on the eyes as now differences where on lines below each other in stead of 1000s of character positions in one line you had to scroll through.

There is two important things to remember with tidy that both stem from its ancestry (it originates from an HTML):

  • you have to specify -xml
  • you have to specify the characterset (even though XML can specify it and without a definition, XML by default is UTF8, tidy does not know about that)

These were the command-lines I used on Windows to do the pretty printing:

tidy -xml -utf8 QCScaper.test@borland.com.cds.xml > QCScaper.test@borland.com.tidy.cds.xml
xmllint --format QCScaper.test@borland.com.cds.xml > QCScaper.test@borland.com.pretty-printed.cds.xml

Another trick is to write a small Delphi program centered around the FormatXMLData call which has been present since Delphi 2007 (see [WayBack] devnet.pdf), but documented since Delphi 2009 in [WayBack] XMLDoc.FormatXMLData Function.

Example code: [WayBack] delphi – How to reformat XML programmatically? – Stack Overflow.

An alternative is to use OmniXML: [WayBack] delphi – Nice bit of code to format an xml string – Stack Overflow

–jeroen

Related posts:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Beyond Compare, Development, Power User, XML, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »

… compare two JSON structures and pin-point … the differences – – Nicholas Ring – Google+

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/08/20

I’ve added a few WayBack/Archive.is links to the interesting comments by Zoë Peterson from Scooter Software (of Beyond Compare fame) at [WayBack] … compare two JSON structures and pin-point … the differences – – Nicholas Ring – Google+:

Beyond Compare 4 has an optional “JSON sorted” file format that uses jq to pretty print and sort JSON data before comparing it. It’s not included out of the box yet, but you can get a copy here:

If you’re interested in an actual algorithm and not just an app, I don’t have a suggestion handy, but could dig one up. Tree alignment is more complicated than sequence alignment and we did do research into it, but it was quite a few years ago and didn’t get incorporated into BC. XML alignment algorithms were being actively researched back in the aughts and they should trivially transfer to JSON.
…

It looks like our research mostly ended around 2002, and I wasn’t personally involved in it, so I don’t know how helpful this will be, but here’s what I have:

The general idea in the thread is that JSON – though not as formalised as XML – does have structure, so if you can normalise it, then XML ways of differencing should work.

Normalisation also means that you need to normalise any floating point, date time, escaping, quoting, etc. Maybe not for the faint of heart.

–jeroen

Posted in Beyond Compare, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, JSON, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »

sebastien/sink: Swiss army knife for directory comparison and synchronization

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/08/02

If you don’t have Beyond Compare available for your platform (or cannot connect via Beyond Compare to it): sebastien/sink: Swiss army knife for directory comparison and synchronization.

The Python script in it does 3-way directory compares on the console.

It is very similar to the Beyond Compare “folder merge” functionality.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Beyond Compare, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Hunting for Beyond Compare on your system: bc.bat

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/10/23

For my archive bc.bat it finds Beyond Compare, then starts it with the given command line parameters. It prefers version 4 over version 3 and user settings over system settings:

:begin
@echo off
  setlocal
  IF /I %PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE% == amd64 goto :x64
  IF /I %PROCESSOR_ARCHITEW6432% == amd64 goto :x64
  goto :x86
:x64
  :: OS is 64bit
  set hkcuBaseKey=HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare
  set hklmBaseKey=HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare
  
  goto :findBC
:x86
  :: OS is 32bit
  set hkcuBaseKey=HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare
  set hklmBaseKey=HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare
  goto :findBC
:findBC
  :: https://gist.github.com/rojepp/634908
  :: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5369528/windows-batch-reg-query-key-value-to-a-variable-but-do-not-display-error-if-key
  set SupportedBeyondCompareVersions=3, 4
  for %%v in (%SupportedBeyondCompareVersions%) do (
    for /f "usebackq tokens=2* delims= " %%c in (`reg query "%hkcuBaseKey% %%v" /v ExePath 2^>NUL`) do (
      call :do set bcExe="%%d"
    )
  )
  if not [%bcExe%]==[] goto :foundBC
    for /f "usebackq tokens=2* delims= " %%c in (`reg query "%hkcuBaseKey%" /v ExePath 2^>NUL`) do (
      call :do set bcExe="%%d"
    )
  if not [%bcExe%]==[] goto :foundBC
  for %%v in (%SupportedBeyondCompareVersions%) do (
    for /f "usebackq tokens=2* delims= " %%c in (`reg query "%hklmBaseKey% %%v" /v ExePath 2^>NUL`) do (
      call :do set bcExe="%%d"
    )
  )
  if not [%bcExe%]==[] goto :foundBC
    for /f "usebackq tokens=2* delims= " %%c in (`reg query "%hklmBaseKey%" /v ExePath 2^>NUL`) do (
      call :do set bcExe="%%d"
    )
:foundBC
  if [%bcExe%]==[] ( echo no bc.exe found in registry) else (
    echo bcExe=%bcExe%
    if exist %bcExe% start "Beyond Compare" %bcExe% %*
    if not exist %bcExe% echo not found: [%bcExe%]
  )
:exit
  endlocal
:end
  goto :eof
:do
  ::echo %*
  call %*
  goto :eof

–jeroen

Posted in Batch-Files, Beyond Compare, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Plastic SCM command-line for merge and diff

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/09/03

Just in case I have Plastic SCM without Beyond Compare:

Merge

"C:\Program Files\PlasticSCM5\client\mergetool" -b="%TEMP%\baseFile-guid.pas" -bn="baseSymbolicName" -bh="baseHash" -s="%TEMP%\sourceFile-guid.pas" -sn="srcSymbolicName" -sh="srcHash" -d="...\destinationPath\destinationFile.pas" -dh="destinationHash" -a -r="%TEMP%\resultFile.pas" -t="text" -i="NotIgnore" -e="NONE" -m="forced" -re="NONE" --progress="progressDescription" --extrainfofile="%TEMP%\extraInfoFile.tmp"

Diff

To be done

aa

Merge help (takes about 10 seconds to start):

"C:\Program Files\PlasticSCM5\client\mergetool.exe" --help

---------------------------
Mergetool usage
---------------------------
Usage: mergetool [ | ]

    diffOptions:  []

    mergeOptions:   [] [[] [] ] [] []

        baseFile:            {-b | --base}= 
        baseSymbolicName:    {-bn | --basesymbolicname}=
        automatic:           -a | --automatic
        silent:              --silent
        resultFile:          {-r | --result}=
        mergeType:           {-m | --mergeresolutiontype}={onlyone | onlysrc | onlydst | try | forced}

    generalFiles:  []  []

        sourceFile:          {-s | --source}=
        srcSymbolicName:     {-sn | --srcsymbolicname}=
        destinationFile:     {-d | --destination}= 
        dstSymbolicName:     {-dn | --dstsymbolicname}=

    generalOptions: [] [] [] []

        defaultEncoding:     {-e | --encoding}={none |ascii | unicode | bigendian | utf7 | utf8}
        comparisonMethod:    {-i | --ignore}={none | eol | whitespaces | eol&whitespaces}
        fileType:            {-t | --filestype}={text/csharp | text/XML | text}
        resultEncoding:      {-re | --resultencoding}={none |ascii | unicode | bigendian | utf7 | utf8}
        progress:            {--progress}=progress string indicating the current progress, for example: Merging file 1/8
        extraInfoFile:       {--extrainfofile}=path to a file that contains extra info about the merge

    Remarks:
          
        -a | --automatic:    Tries to resolve the merge automatically.
                             If the merge can't be resolved automatically (requires user interaction), the merge tool is shown.
        --silent:            This option must be used combined with the --automatic option.
                             When a merge can't be resolved automatically, this option causes the tool to return immediately
                             with a non-zero exit code (no merge tool is shown).
                             If the tool was able to resolve the merge automatically, the program returns exit code 0.

    Examples:

        mergetool
        mergetool -s=file1.txt -d=file2.txt
        mergetool -s=file1.txt -b=file0.txt --destination=file2.txt
        mergetool --base=file0.txt -d=file2.txt --source=file1.txt --automatic --result=result.txt
        mergetool -b=file0.txt -s=file1.txt -d=file2.txt -a -r=result.txt -e=utf7 -i=eol -t=text/csharp -m=onlyone
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

The merge extraInfoFile.tmp has a syntax like this:

Source (cs:-#)
    relative-sourceFile from cs:-# created by userName on timeStamp
    Comments: Source changeset description

Base (cs:#)
    relative-baseFile from cs:#@/baseBranch by userName on timeStamp
    Comments: BO's + CRUDS 

Destination (cs:#)
    relative-destinationFile from cs@/destinationBranch created by userName on timeStamp
    Comments: Destination changeset description

Where each cs is a change set number.

–jeroen

Posted in Beyond Compare, Development, PlasticSCM, Power User, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

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