Is there a way to tell the WinMerge to exclude date/time comparison?

Question

I have several log files with content like this:

2022-03-13 21:16:46.367972: I This is a test1

Is there a way to tell the WinMerge to exclude date/time comparison without removing a timestamp with a RegEx?

These logs come from a program that produces logs. I have to find differences between messages in 2 files, ignoring timestamps.

Answer 1

WinMerge has various "PreDiffer" plugins that you can configure and enable - in this case, it might be simplest to have it ignore the values in a range of columns where the date/time-stamps exist in both files, assuming they are placed in common columns for both files.

Plugins -> Plugin Settings -> ignoreColumns.dll -> range of column numbers with timestamps to not include in comparisons

Then, make sure you enable this plugin by selecting:

Plugins -> Prediffer -> ignoreColumns.dll

Answer 2

Apparently it's possible with a custom plugin. WinMerge has several custom made plugins in C:\Program Files\WinMerge\MergePlugins. One of them is called "PrediffLineFilter.sct" that is intended to exclude some part of a line before comparison. But for some reason it didn't work for me.

Instead, I switched to Beyond Compare. It has a feature called "Unimpotrant text".

Below is a "How To":

1. In text comparison mode enter "Rules"
2. Add a new "Unimportant text"
3. Add a text to exclude.
   In my case, to exclude log timestamp, I used "\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\s\d\d:\d\d:\d\d.\d\d\d\d\d\d"
4. If you use RegEx, check a proper checkbox
5. If you want to see only differences, press "Diffs" button
6. If you want to exclude "Unimportant text" from differences, press "Minor" button

Answer 3

You can use filter now

You can setup a regex filter like in the picture with

• \[\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}\.\d{3}\] for date like
• [11:55:27.519]

Filter config: