I'm a bad librarian, I don't know how to do a search for this.

[snarp]

I need a piece of software that will thwart evil.

I have about a hundred text files, which contain lists of about eighty numbered questions, 4000 words in length. Most of them seem to be identical text-wise, but I've turned up one that has some very minor differences.

I need a way to search through all these files and figure out if there are any others with different text. I really don't want to have to skim 1600 pages of this stuff - I'm afraid I'll miss something, and I've got more important things to be doing. I guess conceivably I could put a script together myself, but I've only recently started playing with regular expressions, and it might take longer than doing the project by hand.

The thwarting evil part comes in here: We were sent these files by a horrible law firm representing a horrible corporation, who inserted these discrepancies precisely to waste our time. The horrible corporation needs representation because they recently -ed over several hundred desperately poor people, a number of whom are now homeless. There will come a reckoning. But first I need, like, a Python script or something.

Comments

[nicki]

could you feed them into one of those programs that checks for plagarism in term papers? My understanding is that they highlight identical text in some color and original text in another, so you could just identify the "original" text and discard the rest?