Compare a tool that can mask differences?

Question

I do a lot of file comparisons (source, logs, etc.) and should mask certain sections, for example. date / time / line numbers that cause the difference between each line.

Beyond Compare allows you to pre-process files, but then you need to write code snippets to do this.

Is there a tool like a GUI that allows you to mask sections of a file through a filter, for example. skip columns 10-16, skip data between word x and word y, etc.

Answer 1

Check out WinMerge . It has the ability to filter strings based on regular expressions.

Answer 2

I do not know any GUI tools, but if you are in a unix environment you can transfer both files via sed or awk

#Example: skip first word sed 's/^[^[:space:]]*//' yourfile1 >file1.tmp sed 's/^[^[:space:]]*//' yourfile2 >file2.tmp diff file1.tmp file2.tmp