CODEWITHSUNDEEP
diffbeyondcomparebeyondcompare3
jxramos
jxramos

Reputation: 8266

How to develop additional File Formats for BeyondCompare

I see that BeyondCompare can be extended to include additional file formats, as in Additional File Viewer Rules for Beyond Compare 2 and also Additional file format downloads for version 3 but after a quick initial search I don't see how user's develop these special viewers. Is that documented anywhere?

I downloaded a few additional viewers which are handily imported via the BCFormats.bcpkg file

C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 3\Helpers>dir /b /s
C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 3\Helpers\HtmlTidy
C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 3\Helpers\PdfToText.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 3\Helpers\XLS_to_TAB_Single.vbs
C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 3\Helpers\HtmlTidy\HtmlTidy.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 3\Helpers\HtmlTidy\XML_tidied_sorted.bat
C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 3\Helpers\HtmlTidy\XML_tidied_sorted_config.txt

What's the design to these things, are they something to the effect of a command line tool that reads in a text file as the first argument and outputs the converted file to standard output?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1476

Answers (2)

jxramos
jxramos

Reputation: 8266

In another question (Compare Json Files in Beyond Compare ) I walk through a step by step example that demonstrates some json conversion for diffs to lend a concrete example to this question. What Chris said above is spot on, it's basically a console application that uses some fixed argument positions to take in the input file path as well as an output file path that the text representation will be written to.

$myConvertingConsoleApp $inputFilePath $outputFilePath

Beyond compare will actually provide the actual arguments used by the console application during the conversion process.

It's worth noting that the input file need not even be a text file so long as you can come up with some sane textual representation of the file format that makes sense for diff algorithms to operate upon.

Upvotes: 0

Chris Kennedy
Chris Kennedy

Reputation: 2899

They are command line tools that preprocess a file before it is loaded for comparison. The first argument is an input file and the second argument is an output filename. As an example, the pdftotext.exe tool extracts a .pdf file to a plain text .txt file, then displays the temp file in Beyond Compare's Text Compare.

See Beyond Compare's help file topic Text Format Conversion Settings for details.

Upvotes: 1

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