Text Comparisons Options

Apply text comparison for files matching the following patterns

All files matching the specified patterns will be compared using the Text comparison algorithm and the corresponding options.

Ignore differences in whitespaces at start of lines

Check this option to ignore the whitespaces characters* at the start of lines during text comparisons.

Ignore differences in whitespaces in middle of lines

Check this option to ignore the whitespaces characters* within lines during text comparisons.

Ignore differences in whitespaces at end of lines

Check this option to ignore the whitespaces characters* at the end of lines during text comparisons.

Treat blank lines as empty lines

Check this option when you want to ignore differences between lines containing only whitespaces characters*. This may be useful because most of the programming languages accept empty lines, and simply ignore them. In such a case, you probably don't need to merge changes only made of empty lines.

Ignore differences in character case

Check this option to match the uppercase and lowercase characters during text comparisons. This option may be useful when comparing text files using case-insensitive languages (such as VBScript source code, HTML...).

Ignore differences in line ending characters

Check this option to ignore differences between Windows, UNIX and Apple line termination (respectively CR+LF, LF and CR) when comparing text files. You may need to compare files edited or producted on different computer operating systems. This option makes easier the comparison, it highlights the real differences in the text files. When merging files with different line termination characters

Ignore changes made of lines matching

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). Please 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.

See also