Compares Text of all changed files between 2 commits using 2 checked out branches/commits

This tool will take 2 directories of the same repository [source and target] and compare the diff between the 2 commits. Since git diff compares binary, this tool is helpful because it will guess the charset encoding via nchardet and compare the actual string values via Diff Patch and Match. Background on this is that our team needed to convert our repository's charset from windows-1252 to UTF-8. It touched roughly 2000 files and we did not want to spot-check every one of them. So, I wrote this to highlight the files with actual text changes. Out of those ~2000 files, only 5 had a difference in content, so this saved us a lot of time.

You will need the .NET Core Runtime.

Build this project after cloning master. To do that, you can refer to this link.

To run, enter CompareBranches [sourceDir] [targetDir] on the command line in the directory where CompareBranches.exe resides.

The tool will compare the 2 branches and output a file with the format of output-[longtime].txt in the assembly's executing directory. This file is straightforward to read with each file separated by a line of equal signs and each difference noted.

nchardet

Diff Patch and Match