Whitespace characters are any of the following: space, tab, carriage return, and line feed. You can change the comparison options for whitespace characters from the Tools | Comparison Options menu.
When the Compare as is option is enabled, Text A is considered equal to Text B if characters in Text A (including whitespace characters) correspond to those in Text B. The whitespace characters are relevant for comparison.
When the Normalize option is enabled, Text A is equal to Text B if, after normalization, characters in Text A correspond to those in Text B. “Normalization” means that multiple consecutive occurrences of whitespace characters are replaced by a single space character. Also, the leading and trailing whitespace characters are trimmed for each line of text.
| Note: | In case of XML (  ) comparison, the leading and trailing whitespace characters in element and attribute values are trimmed. |
When the Strip all option is enabled, Text A is considered equal to Text B if, after stripping whitespace characters, characters in Text A correspond to those in Text B. In other words, any whitespace characters are stripped from the text and considered not relevant for comparison.
| Note: | In case of XML comparison ( ), whitespace characters that are outside attribute or element values are disregarded for comparison. This is true for any of the whitespace options above. |
The following table illustrates differences when comparing text with each option, using text ( 
) or Word comparison.
Text A |
Text B |
As is |
Normalize |
Strip |
|---|---|---|---|---|
"a" |
"a " |
not equal |
equal |
equal |
"a" |
" a" |
not equal |
equal |
equal |
"a a" |
"a a" |
not equal |
equal |
equal |
The following table illustrates differences when comparing text with each option, using XML ( ) comparison.
Text A |
Text B |
As is |
Normalize |
Strip |
|---|---|---|---|---|
<?xml version="1.0" |
<?xml version="1.0" |
equal |
equal |
equal |
<book id="1"> |
<book id=" 1 "> |
not equal |
equal |
equal |
<author>Mark Twain</author> |
<author>Mark Twain</author> |
not equal |
equal |
equal |
