Comparison and text extraction between Long-Text Fields

[Maria_Juliana_Y]

Hello Airtable Community,

I have two Long-Text Fields associated with the same record.

I would like to make a comparison between both Long-Text Fields, which allows me to:

1. Extract in a field the identical text
2. Extract the differential text in a field

I appreciate any leads on this, and thank you in advance for your help.

[Bill_French]

Hi Maria,

Maria_Juliana_Yepes:

Extract in a field the identical text

If the texts are identical, I assume you need a third field indicating so. A simple field comparison is all that is needed, and a formula can handle this easily.

Maria_Juliana_Yepes:

Extract the differential text in a field

This is a bigger challenge and probably suited for some script. Patience Diff, a concise javascript implementation of the Patience Diff algorithm is generally a good approach for finding the differences between two texts. There’s also a plus enhancement which is an implementation of a new algorithm dubbed Patience Diff Plus, which in addition to the usual Patience Diff, identifies lines that moved.

[Maria_Juliana_Y]

Thank you for your help @Bill.French! I am studying several things because I don’t know how to implement this script. I will let you know if it works.

[Hannah_Wiginton]

Hey @Maria_Juliana_Yepes,

We have a few automations in our On2Air Actions app for Airtable that can accomplish what you need (without having to code.)

Depending on exactly what you need, here are some options:

Field Diff Log - It will keep a running log of changes to any field within a Long Text Field and track changes made to fields.

Items in One List But Not in Others - It will extract values from one field that are not found in multiple other fields and add it to another field. This is useful for searching fields and finding any values that are not present and adding it to another field.

Unique Arrays – Search 1 or multiple fields for unique data and store the unique values in another field. Useful for filtering out duplicates.

You can test it out with a free trial or we can give you a quick demo.