Confusing file compare when A is in B but B is longer than A

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prino
Posts: 14
Joined: 19 Sep 2008 13:43

Confusing file compare when A is in B but B is longer than A

Post by prino »

Comparing two files, result, a pop-up with:

"The chosen files are identical. The file sizes are different, though!"

Oops...

Files are two text files, one ends with an extra CR/LF/EOF (x0D0A1A) sequence...
Robert AH Prins
robert.ah.prins @ the.17+Gb.Google thingy
https://prino.neocities.org/zOS/zOS-Tools.html - Some programming here :mrgreen:
Maël
Site Admin
Posts: 1455
Joined: 12 Mar 2005 14:15

Re: File compare bug

Post by Maël »

Yes, that's expected and what the message tries to convey. They are identical up to the point where one file continues and has additional bytes. So A is contained in B. But B is longer and a superset (or more correctly supersequence) of A.

The reason was that there is no way to step through the additional bytes since one side (the shorter file) will have no bytes to compare to.

Agreed though that the wording is confusing, and it would probably be more intuitive and useful to have it show the additional bytes as red or something.

I'll move it to feature requests.
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