Total Commander

Hi!

today's internal tool Compare by content is working rather perfectly - but with one minus, imho - I can't somehow to say to him @Hey you! pls, stop calculate these and those diffs as a diff@. Temporary - for a single session.
For example i must compare 2 logs which diffs of course by time-stamp on each line AND with one real sub-part of one single string....
Obviously that in todays realization of compare I will see the massive amount of diffs - because on each line do exist a new time-stamp. So to find that line which contains REAL diff in sub-part of the string - will be very hard.
So my suggestion is - to have some combobox in which I can setup some RegExp-based exception which can be applied on each difference. And if regexp is true - do not calculate this diff as a diff)))
Combobox will hold the history of its input, of course.

so what do you think about this?

I don't think that this will work. Currently TC builds checksums (hashes) for each line in a file, and then looks for matching checksums. To ignore the difference, the two lines must somehow be made to have the same checksum, e.g. by skipping a certain part in the line or so.

Just an FYI:

While TC's file compare tool is (currently) unable to do some (custom) preprocessing of the file data to be compared, other file compare tools might do the job for you.

WinMerge could be such a tool. It has a feature called "prediffers", which are plug-ins or scripts that process the data/text lines of the files before comparing them. While i am not a user of WinMerge myself, a cursory look into the plug-in files/script of WinMerge seems to show that those scripts are or can be written in VBScript. If you have a strong need for the feature you asked for, you might want to look into WinMerge and how you can write or adapt an existing prediffing script according to your needs. (Perhaps there might already be a "prediffer" plug-in/script that would cover your needs, although i haven't encountered one during my admittedly _very_ cursory look at the prediffers the portable WinMerge package comes with...)