Anybody know how I can search for the percentage difference between two large bodies of text?
I basically need to find out if they are 100% identical - without painstakingly reading them manually of course.
PS. Unsure whether this is fit for Rumpus Room or General Discussion.
You are looking for a diff tool I guess?
A quick search brings up this tool: https://www.diffchecker.com/diff (https://www.diffchecker.com/diff)
If the text is in files on your disk, there is a good bunch of text comparison tools.
To name a couple of favourites:
WinMerge (http://winmerge.org/)
KDiff (http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/)
That's brilliant, thanks cat and Crimson :-D
I did google it but was obviously dumb in my choice of search term.
The tools named previously are great, but if you want to stick to a general-purpose tool without installing an extra application, then use Notepad++ (note the "++"). You should have already have it on your computer, like every civilized person on this planet. Then simply add the Compare plugin (http://sourceforge.net/projects/npp-plugins/files/). You're done.
Pish pash! Civilised people use AGS and implement this algorithm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance#Iterative_with_two_matrix_rows