When comparing 2 files, WinWords file compare utility often marks a lengthy original string as deleted and it's equivalent new version as inserted, even though the actuall differences can be boiled down to just 2 or 3 characters.

Someone editing the text must then visually compare those strings in order to evaluate which version should be kept and which discarded.

I would like to have a VBA-program comparing the deleted and inserted strings in detail and boiling down the broadly applied revision marks to the actual differences. Additionally such a program could be generally used to compare similar strings, highlighting the differences as revision marks.

It seems such a program would have to largely emulate WinWords file compare utility and additionally drill down to marking exact differences where WinWord doesn't do so.

Has anybody already attempted such a project (I haven't found anything of that kind in any user forum I've been searching so far) and/or can anybody chip in some ideas of how to approach it? As long as the strings are only differing in 2-3 letters it looks relatively straight forward, but once they are differing in length and/or contain several similar but not identical character patterns things seem to become pretty complex. Are there, maybe, some general logical approaches to a detailled string compare?

Thank you very much in advance,


Marcel