Diffmerge Cobol source

[ysl]

I'm trying to use Diffmerge to compare Cobol source. Unfortunately, my regex is not very good.

How can I get Diffmerge to compare only the contents of my source file from columns 7 to 72 & ignore everything outside of those columns?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

[Beth]

There isn't currently. I can take a feature request.

[ysl]

Was there a version of Diffmerge which allowed the user to specify a regex expression to identify the area to compare?

I seem to recall that I once used Diffmerge to restrict comparison to the area from column 7 to 72. Was there a version prior to 3.0 which allowed that? If there was, is there a way to get it?

If not, I would be deeply grateful if someone could come out with a ruleset for this type of compare. I can't figure out how to get it to ignore the 1st few columns & the rest of the columns after column 72, if present, under Content Handling.

Cheers

[jeffhostetler]

Ignoring by column didn't make into DiffMerge 3.0. Sorry.

The previous versions didn't have it either.

You might be able to get a regex cover only the 7-72
area, but I'm not sure that that will do what you want.
That is, marking various columns 'unimportant' is different
than 'exclude from analysis'.

For example, if the stuff in excluded area contains
auto-generated sequence numbers that tend to change,
you probably want the latter...

sorry,
j

[ysl]

Thanks for the feedback.

I must've been using another tool previously. I could've sworn that it was your DiffMerge.

It's just too bad that the 'feature' is not in this tool but I would've thot that there might be a need for such a feature other than for doing Cobol source compares.

Cheers

[jeffhostetler]

I'll log a feature request for this.


j