How to efficiently merge 2 buffers which are partially overlapping?

Question

Problem summary

Imagine, you have 2 shopping lists:

• 1 huge one with hundreds of entries - list A, copied into buffer A
• 1 containing dozens of entries - list B, copied into buffer B

Then:

• 75% of the entries of list B are already part of list A, but the other rest of list B not—and you don't have a clue or overview which specific entries of list B are the new ones compared to list A.

• You want to extend list A by list B, so that the "new list A" contains all entries of list A and B without any doppler—so, each entry just 1 time.

To make a simple example:

  List A:        List B:      What you want—"new list A":

  * Tomato       * Garlic     * Tomato
  * Leek         * Tomato     * Leek
  * Garlic       * Cherries   * Garlic
  * Lentils      * Leek       * Lentils
  * Banana                    * Banana
  * Almond milk               * Almond milk
                              * Cherries

Question

How can that be done as efficient as possible?

Info:

• I'm not able to program.
• I'm very new to the emacs command "ediff", yet.
• I'm relatively new to emacs, using it just for 1 year on a daily basis so far.
• I'm getting familiar with using keyboard macros, and keyboard marcos built of a series of keyboard macros—like keyboard macro D(A + 7xB + 3xC)

Details on research:

I've already researched on it using web search engines and starting to turn to the emacs command "ediff".

What I've tried:

I tried M-x ediff-buffers, but the outcome wasn't very useful: Both buffers were compared automatically, but not in a smart way; comparison wasn't content sensitive, but line by line, so it said "line 1, 2, 3,... are not the same", when I needed it to say "Cherries is different".

Next thing I've tried was M-x ediff-buffers3 for merging, but it had the same problem:

It just let me choose, if for example line 2 of buffer A or buffer B will be used for the merge version, when I wanted emacs to automatically figure out what entries of list B are the new ones for list A and then merging list A only with these new entries.

I see the possibility of taking list B and manually take each entry of it—one by one—and search for it in list A. This way I would figure out by what entries of list B the list A needs to be extended, but that's an arse full of work.

There gotta has to be a more efficient way with any emacs commands.

Answer 1

You don't need to do anything fancy with ediff or keyboard macros. Just concatenate the two files together, then remove any duplicates.

You can do that at the command line: cat a b | sort | uniq > c

Or you can do it in emacs: paste both lists into a single buffer, then select everything with C-x h. Run M-x sort-lines to sort them, then M-x delete-duplicate-lines to remove the duplicates. Save it to a new file.