winmerge
There are a lot of difference which I am not interested. For example, consider the following case:
LEFT : XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX
RIGHT: XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX OPTIOINAL XYZ
I want to ignore this pattern of difference, but I just can make the filter work. Any suggestion?
I would have thought that WinMerge with the following settings would work:
If it doesn't, I would ask the question in their forums.
I believe this is worth the effort, as WinMerge is my best file-compare product.
In the dialog where you choose the files/folders to compare the last row is the "Unpacker". Select the Files you want to compare, Click "Select" (Next to "Unpacker"). Then choose "amb_xdocdiffPlugin.dll" from the dropdown
Best Answer
I found this post because I was also struggling with WinMerge. The line filter documentation goes right at RegEx, so did I. Stupid me; none of the expressions I made did any filtering. Turns out you just put the string in common to left and right lines and it works like I want.
For example, I am comparing 2 XML files for certain differences. Some lines contain these strings:
IntID IntRef
They are preceded by whitespace, and open tag string and followed by a UUID, which is the entity that is causing a difference I would like to ignore.
So I just added two line filters with just the strings and no RegEx stuff. It was a bit slow to process a 12M file, but I more than made up for the time in having to ignore 1000+ hits to see the 4 differences.
I think this is what you are after with the XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX on the left and right. I am assuming the data is the same on each side.