Oxygen XML Forum

Hi there,

I'm getting lots of false positives from whitespace differences when I do a file comparison.

I'm trying to set up a simple round-trip editorial workflow along the following lines:

1. check topic out of SVN using the SVN client
2. edit topic
3. compare using the diff tool
4. commit

At step #3, I'm finding that whitespace differences are not being ignored, even when the "ignore whitespace" button is pressed (it makes some difference though). Doing a simple format and indent is enough to generate scads of false positives between two files.

I've tried the different compare algorithms, and they all seem to give similar results.

Am I missing something here?

Thanks

Andrew W.

Hello,

Are the topics XML files? If they are XML files and you apply the XML Accurate algorithm or the XML Fast one then I cannot reproduce the problem and some sample files will be helpful.

If the topics are not XML files and they are compared with one of the other algorithms (Syntax Aware, Lines, Words, etc) then some whitespace differences will be always reported and marked in the two side panel of the diff tool. For example when comparing two versions of a text file using the Lines algorithm with one version containing additional whitespace-only lines then these whitespace-only lines will be marked as differences regardless of the value of the option Ignore Whitespaces due to the nature of the Lines algorithm (but whitespace differences on mixed lines will be ignored with the option turned on). Vice versa the Syntax Aware algorithm will mark whitespace differences on mixed lines regardless of the option Ignore Whitespaces but will ignore whitespace-only lines with the option turned on.


Regards,
Sorin