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[BrumGuy]

Text Comparison Tool

[thebruce]

a quick google should bring up a number of shareware/freeware software... but I currently have Beyond Compare installed on my machine (www.scootersoftware.com), for example.

[catherwood]

The programs I use highlight *differences* rather than the text which is the same in two files. I use WinDiff myself, but some people prefer FileSynch for that.

(edit to add) WinDiff can also compare two directories, telling you which files differ between directory listings, as well as which files having the same name are different.

[BrumGuy]

Hi both - and thanks for the quick replies.


I've had a quick peep at "Beyond Compare", or more accurately the website detailing what it can do, and it seems to be much the same as FileSynch and WinDiff, so not sure that it's what i am looking for??

Essentially, I want something that will search through selected website pages, (the more the merrier), and highlight strings of text which are common to at least two of them. Basically, a common phrase spotter, that I do not need to know what the phrase is prior to starting the comparison.

Any and all help, is and will be appreciated, as my own google trawling hasn't turned up anything useful, but then again I do not even know if my search terms are correct!!


Thanks for the help so far, and thebruce have I misunderstood about "Beyond Compare"??


Brum

[thebruce]

[thebruce]

double post: just did a quick google and came a possible contender - oxygenxml editor (based on this ability, including url comparison)

I haven't checked it out, but it looks like it might accomplish what you're looking for

[Rogi Ocnorb]

The only type of tool I have encountered along these lines are duplicate file checkers for system cleanup activities. However, those always compare files at the file level. A tool such as the one you seek might be found by including what would be a necessary aspect of such searches in its basic operation... The ability to compare "paragraphs", "sentences", "phrases" and/or "Minimum number of concurrent words" as if it compared files only at the word level and only used single words in its searches it would be a pretty useless tool.

[catherwood]

i returned to add to my post above, but then saw all of the replies. If you don't know in advance what terms two files (or webpages) might have in common, how will you judge the results? Any two random webpages are likely to share many words in common: the, click, menu, home, copyright, etc. -- maybe you just want to compare meta keywords instead?

[realityshifter]

I'm not sure if this tool will help, but there is a site called Copyscape that I commonly use to make sure nobody else is copying the content from my own web site, and I think it might work in a roundabout way for the purpose you described.

If you know the URL of one of the pages, you can type the URL into the search field at copyscape.com and it will return a list of search results with other sites/pages throughout the net that have matching text. It will rank the search results based on which ones have the most matching text when compared to the URL you entered, and it will highlight the matching parts too, which makes it very handy. So, if you enter a URL and there are phrases or entire sentences or paragraphs on that page that also show up somewhere on another site, the other site will turn up in the search results and you can click on the result to see a view of the other site with those matching phrases/sentences highlighted.

There are two downsides: First, you'd have to know the URL of at least one of the pages in order for the Copyscape site to be useful for you. Second, you can only perform a certain number of free searches per month on any given domain name. I think the limit is ten free URL searches per domain per month.

[redct]

WinDiff is a great tool. If you're on a Mac/Linux/Unix/etc you can just use diff. It supports a wide range of options (ignore case, ignore spacing, ignore tabs and a whole bunch of other things)