Tool for comparing a single line of text

Question

Is there a tool for comparing two lines of text?

All the tools I have compare on a line level, when I really need a character level diff in the line.

Windows or *nix, GUI or command line, I don't care.

See http://superuser.com/questions/43270/file-compare-recommendation most apps highlight differences within a line too. — ChrisF, May 25 '10 at 21:14
@ChrisF I'm already using WinMerge, and it does ... ok, but not exactly what I'm looking for. — C. Ross, May 27 '10 at 00:14

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered May 25 '10 at 21:19

7

I use vimdiff often to compare two files side by side. vimdiff in color mode will highlight all differences between corresponding lines on each side. I'm using it to look for different characters on two different lines (in different files) right now.

answered May 25 '10 at 21:19

Stefan Lasiewski

3,170

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered May 25 '10 at 21:28

5

kdiff is one open source diff utility that shows character by character differences as well as line by line. I'm sure there are others. Here's link for kdiff: http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

answered May 25 '10 at 21:28

Herbert Sitz

336

+1 I love this program (to be fair, I haven't really tried anything else for comparison) – David Z May 26 '10 at 02:35

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered May 25 '10 at 21:39

1

DiffMerge does pretty good at highlighting word or character differences. Better than WinMerge, IME.

answered May 25 '10 at 21:39

afrazier

23,185

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 03 '13 at 18:03

0

Use this perl script from the git project.

answered Apr 03 '13 at 18:03

Steven Lu

3,668

Tool for comparing a single line of text

4 Answers4