RegEx to ignore beginning of line
Moderator: SourceGear
RegEx to ignore beginning of line
I am trying to figure out how to ignore the first 4 characters of each line when comparing two files. I know that the 5th character will be a space, so it seems like I should be able to accomplish this by setting the context boundaries in a ruleset, but I can't get it to work. I've tried several RegEx variations, and unchecked the "Classify differences as Important", but nothing works. Any guidance would be appreciated.
-
jeffhostetler
- Posts: 534
- Joined: Tue Jun 05, 2007 11:37 am
- Location: SourceGear
- Contact:
Re: RegEx to ignore beginning of line
Sorry, but we don't support ignoring or excluding data by columns.
There are 2 ways to think of this feature:
[1] strip the columns out of the line before comparing them.
(the "ignore whitespace when matching lines" feature does
that, but it only handles whitespace.)
[2] don't strip them in the line-compare phase, but rather use the
"classify differences as important" feature to not color/not-color
them during the drawing phase. (the "hide unimportant differences"
feature does this.)
I'm guessing that you want [1]. I've had several requests to be
able to ignore columns, such as 1-7 and/or 72-80 for Fortran or
Cobol source code.
In fact, you probably want a combination of both [1] and [2] -- that is,
ignore them for in the line-matching (vertical alignment) and then
ignore them again in the coloring/highlight.
Getting the RegEx right to use just [2] is problematic. Using something
with a leading "^", for example doesn't work correctly right now because
of a bug in how I'm resetting the pattern within a line (so that I can
identify the start of multiple comments within a line).
Sorry I don't have a better answer for you right now (and sorry to
make this so complicated (both the code and the description of the
problem)).
jeff hostetler
item:12969
There are 2 ways to think of this feature:
[1] strip the columns out of the line before comparing them.
(the "ignore whitespace when matching lines" feature does
that, but it only handles whitespace.)
[2] don't strip them in the line-compare phase, but rather use the
"classify differences as important" feature to not color/not-color
them during the drawing phase. (the "hide unimportant differences"
feature does this.)
I'm guessing that you want [1]. I've had several requests to be
able to ignore columns, such as 1-7 and/or 72-80 for Fortran or
Cobol source code.
In fact, you probably want a combination of both [1] and [2] -- that is,
ignore them for in the line-matching (vertical alignment) and then
ignore them again in the coloring/highlight.
Getting the RegEx right to use just [2] is problematic. Using something
with a leading "^", for example doesn't work correctly right now because
of a bug in how I'm resetting the pattern within a line (so that I can
identify the start of multiple comments within a line).
Sorry I don't have a better answer for you right now (and sorry to
make this so complicated (both the code and the description of the
problem)).
jeff hostetler
item:12969