(Note: you’ll probably have to parse out the line number to make the sort work exactly right, but Excel’s Data>Text to Columns option makes that really easy.)

The elements of your pairs are now adjacent to each other, and you can manipulate away in Excel to compare, view, or filter the data as you wish. Since search results start with “Line 9”, where 9 is the line number in the file, you can sort on the results to get them in line number order. There’s another neat trick you can do if you’re interested in a couple of tags which are close together, and you’re looking for certain pairs of information. Search on each tag, then copy all results to Excel. I can even copy the search results from the split screen to a new file, and then search within the search results. I can scan the results and double click on the one I’m interested in to jump to that line in the file. It lets me search a document, or all open documents, for a given value.

Right now, my business analyst work is with data that is stored in an XML file. I’m only interested in about 10% of the tags in the XML and I often need to scan the entire file for a value in a given tag.

Notepad ++ compare tool results