topic Re: Compare strings and highlight differences in Discussions

Compare strings and highlight differences

MathStatChem — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 22:04:38 GMT

How would I write a function or routine that would compare two strings and show the difference between them?

e.g.

string1="It will rain tomorrow"

string2="It will snow tomorrow"

comparison result (string2 vs string 1) = "It will ~~rain~~snow tomorrow"

Re: Compare strings and highlight differences

txnelson — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 16:37:33 GMT

What are the rules?
Is
It will rain tomorrow
different from
Tomorrow it will rain
If you are just comparing each word from one string to the same position word in a second string, that can easily be done by looping through the strings using the Word() function to compare each word.
But going beyond that, the algorithm can become very complex

Re: Compare strings and highlight differences

MathStatChem — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 19:28:52 GMT

What I want is something akin to what MS Word will do when it compares documents.

The actual thing I want to do is when comparing two data tables, particularly differences in tables scripts and column formulas.

Compare Data Tables will show, for instance, if saved table scripts are different and list them both out, which I can save to a table with the strings in the table in separated columns, but what I want to see is where those two scripts are different.

Re: Compare strings and highlight differences

MathStatChem — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 19:33:04 GMT

Seems like this could be done with regular expressions, I just don't know how.

Re: Compare strings and highlight differences

jthi — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 20:06:07 GMT

Maybe Shortest Edit Script() could be enough?

https://www.jmp.com/support/help/en/15.2/#page/jmp/identifying-differences-between-strings-lines-or-sequences.shtml

https://www.jmp.com/support/help/en/15.2/index.shtml#page/jmp/utility-functions.shtml#ww3843203

Re: Compare strings and highlight differences

Craige_Hales — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 20:43:09 GMT

Re: Compare strings and highlight differences

MathStatChem — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 02:18:12 GMT

Shortest Edit Script gets me the information that I need, that is very helpful, thanks!