How to prevent trimming of characters from visdiff output?

I have developed a MATLAB app programatically and wanted to compare it with a different version and get a "comparison" output from visdiff for the same. The idea is to parse through the output comparison and add any buttons, tabs or tables programatically since MATLAB merge mode is not very reliable for my case.

When I use

comparison = visdiff('file1.m', 'file2.m');

I do get an output in the form of character array but some of the classes for the components are trimmed out. For eg, matlab.ui.container.Button is trimmed and displayed only as matlab.ui.container.Bu

More examples are shown in the figure.

Are there any available options here to prevent that from happening?

[dpb]

I don't find anything in the command line version of visdiff but there is an option in the interactive "Comparison Tool" it appears to change column widths...

There's also the fallback to revert to the OS command line tools -- "fc" on Windows or "diff" on 'nix. Not sure about Mac

ADDENDUM:

How do you manage to generate a LHS assignment from that syntax for m-file comparisons? The visdiff documentation explicitly states that's only possible for comparison of Simulink models and in trying to test here, I find it apparently is true...

>> vdiff=visdiff('app2.mlapp','app1.mlapp');
Error using visdiff (line 81)
Incompatible file formats: No method to compare "C:\Users\Duane\Documents\MATLAB\Answers\app2.mlapp" and "C:\Users\Duane\Documents\MATLAB\Answers\app1.mlapp" outside of the
Comparison Tool GUI. 
>>

The comparison tool opens if don't assign to a LHS, but errors as above otherwise...I've never used it (didn't even know it existed, actually) but don't see any way to get the same result as you're showing...

[Jayanth Suresh]

Thanks for your reply, I did try the option of changing the column widths but unfortunately that did not help my case.

To your second question, I exported the .mlapp files as .m files and then using visdiff on that. Even though the visdiff documentation does not explicitly state that we can get a LHS assignment, it does seem to work when we compare .m files

[dpb]

The latter must be an undocumented change since R2020b...it fails on m-files here, too, so can't see anything except the display version. The comparison report engine is also different for .mlapp and .m files here; only a binary dump shows up for m-files while the enhanced comparison/merge facility is there for appliction files.

Don't guess I can give any further help/advice, sorry...I'm not in position to upgrade at the moment; that's going to have to wait for a completion of current tasks before happening; probably at least another month.

I'd venture it's time to submit official support request; if it's undocumented behavior they may just blow it off, but there may be a workaround they'll help with if it is in an active development mode and beta testing is beneficial on their end, too.

[Jayanth Suresh]

Thanks for the suggestions, I am circling back to this topic to close this out. I did reach out to official support request and this was their reply.

"The behavior you are noticing has been fixed as of MATLAB release R2023a"