Text to Ignore

This panel let you define the texts which can be ignored during differentiation.

Lines to ignore group

Info Currently lines are ignored after matching, it let's unchanged ignorable lines be matched and synchronize text accordingly. This strategy is usually much more efficient than ignoring "a priori" as this knowledge would be lost.

- Lines matching

This expression is matched against each line individually. If you do not specify the ^ and/or $, the match is done against any part of the line.
When this box is filled, the line changes made only of lines matching the regular expression are hidden. They are skipped by the goto next/previous difference and are hidden from the side bars. The syntax of regular expression follows POSIX regular expressions syntax (with some modifications). A helper button is placed to the right of this field and helps enter common constructions. For more information, have a look to Regular expressions in the reference guide. For example:

^$: matches empty lines
^// : matches C++ pure comment lines
^[[:blank:]]*//: matches C++ lines with only (optional) blanks before the comment
\$Id: : matches lines with this marker (generally CVS header)

*: whitespaces are sets of characters containing only space and tabulation characters. End of line characters (CR/LF) are not considered as whitespaces.

- Lines covered by multi-line expression

This expression is searched throughout the entire file, ignoring line ends, then lines entirely covered are ignored. In this expression the dot symbol (.) still does not match new-lines, you need to use the special \n and \r, you will want to use : (\r\n|\r|\n) to match all types of line endings (Windows, Unix and Mac). Use the helper button to enter generic characters or regular expressions constructions.

Portions to ignore inside lines group

- Ignored fixed columns

Enter here the list of columns that you'd like to ignore inside all lines of the text file. For example, use "1-10;15;25-" to ignore column 1 to 10 included, 15, then all columns from 25 to the end of lines. Columns excluded this way never cover the line terminator which is tested separately and which you can ignore by unchecking the "Match line terminators" options in the comparison options.

- Ignore spans with expression : Disabled, Matching, Not matching

Select Matching (or Not matching) to ignore (or respectively to consider only) in each line which matches the given expression at least once, the text covered to the expression. Use the helper button to enter generic characters or regular expressions constructions.

- Use sub-expression

Rather than ignoring or considering only the portion covered by the entire expression, these are the portions covered by any sub-expression which are ignored or considered.

See also

Regular expressions