Does DiffMerge support Unicode?

Support for our DiffMerge utility.

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iconst
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu May 20, 2010 10:45 am

Does DiffMerge support Unicode?

Post by iconst » Thu May 20, 2010 10:48 am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... ison_tools

In this article, at the bottom “Other features” table says that DiffMerge partially supports Unicode. What does that mean and where does it impact?

I am trying to evaluate this tool for my team and I would really appreciate if somebody from DiffMerge developers reply to this question.

Thank you.

jeffhostetler
Posts: 534
Joined: Tue Jun 05, 2007 11:37 am
Location: SourceGear
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Re: Does DiffMerge support Unicode?

Post by jeffhostetler » Thu May 20, 2010 4:03 pm

Yes, we basically support UNICODE.

We try very hard to respect the character encoding of files that we load;
this includes auto-detection of byte-order-marks and having various
configurable options to guess and/or ask the encoding of each file.

When files are loaded into memory they are internally converted from
their on-disk encoding into a common encoding. After editing, files are
converted back to their original on-disk encoding before saving. (So for
example, it is possible to do a 3-way merge where each of the 3 files
has a different encoding and have the saved result be correct.)

The character encoding of each file is displayed in the status bar.

Each Ruleset can specify a default character encoding for files with
matching suffixes. So for example, you can configure DiffMerge to
assume that *.c files are Latin-1 and *.xml files are UTF-8.

The list of character encodings that we support is based upon the
converters installed in your OS, but that is rarely an issue for anyone
anymore.

The only caveat is that we DO NOT support bi-directional or right-to-left
text. We don't respect the direction-change codes, so we probably
won't crash, the display will get stupid real fast.

I've not tried it on any Asian languages, so I'm not sure if there are
any issues there or not. (And even if I had, I wouldn't know whether
the display was wrong or not.) But the tool has been available for 3-4
years and I haven't heard any complaints (yet).)

That about sums it up. I hope that helps. Give it a try (the price is
right) and see if it works for you. And please, let me know if you
find a show-stopper.

jeff hostetler

iconst
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu May 20, 2010 10:45 am

Re: Does DiffMerge support Unicode?

Post by iconst » Fri May 21, 2010 10:45 am

Thank you !!

I have started using and so far its good experience. We are using it with TFS,

Thank you !!

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