In anonymized document, how to locate specific comments via XML

[Peterson]

I have a large document with 100s of anonymized comments. The document was sent out for review with the anonymizing feature left turned on, so the many, many comments added by the reviewer are also anonymous. We need to separate them out.





How would you approach this task? Can it be done programmatically?



I went into comments.xml and found that there's no date/time associated with each comment, so finding them by date wouldn't work. I also found that the comment numbers aren't chronologically sequential, AND that they change as a document evolves. In commentsids.xml, I found a bunch of unique identifiers, but not all identifiers had corresponding comments in the comments.xml file.


I also tried changing the "Author" name of the old comments, via the old doc's comments.xml, then running a compare, but the revised name was reverted back to "Author" in the process.



I ended up dropping the comments.xml text from both the original and the new documents into two Word files, did a compare, and then was able to see where the new comments were. (It would have been easier to simply open both and identify them visually.)



But I have to assume that there IS a way to do this more easily. But how? We face this situation periodically, and it'd be nice to have a tool or process that streamlines untangling the aftermath of leaving the anonymizing feature on when a document goes out for review, and does so more quickly than manually.


Thanks.