Compare tool that can mask differences?
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23-08-2019 - |
Question
I do a lot of file comparisons (source, logs etc.) and need to mask certain sections e.g. dates / times / line numbers which cause every line to be different.
Beyond Compare allows you to pre-process the files but then you have to write pieces of code to do this.
Is there a GUI type tool that allows you to mask sections of the file via a filter e.g. skip columns 10 - 16, skip data between word x and word y etc.?
Solution
Check out WinMerge. It has the ability to filter lines based on regular expressions.
OTHER TIPS
I don't know of any GUI tools, but if you're in a unix environment, you can pipe both files through sed or awk
#Example: skip first word
sed 's/^[^[:space:]]*//' yourfile1 >file1.tmp
sed 's/^[^[:space:]]*//' yourfile2 >file2.tmp
diff file1.tmp file2.tmp
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