Re: diff and ignore regex

[James D . Veale]

  The keyword and phrase processing facility of the 

  Complite File Comparison Family at http://world.std.com/~jdveale

  has allowed you to ignore specified words for many years.  The utilities
  only know about plain ASCII,  so the diacritics may be another story. 
  These utilities perform a word-by-word comparison and can be configured
  to be insensitive to changes in text flow.
  
  Jim Veale

Nadim Shaikli <shaikli@yahoo.com> writes:
>I'm curious if it's possible to add an option to 'diff' so that certain
>regular expression strings (and characters) can be ignored.  So something
>akin to,

> $ diff --ignore_regex "one | two | three" file1.txt file2.txt

>So whenever "one" or "two" or "three" is seen it would be ignored (think
>of it as a more general extension of the '--ignore-space-change' option)
>or maybe allow perl to grok the text to determine the regex or...  This
>would come in _very_ handy for more complex languages where diacritics
>are used which in some instances ought not trigger a 'difference' and so
>it seems logical to give the user the option to ignore certain characters
>and combinations there-of.  This would also be nice for cases where you
>know two documents differ in certain strings/characters yet you want to
>see if there are any other changes.

>Thoughts/comments ?
>Regards,
> - Nadim