Ignore any blank space or line break in git-diff
I have the same HTML file rendered in two different ways and want to compare it using git diff, taking care of ignoring every white-space, tab, line-break, carriage-return, or anything that is not strictly the source code of my files.
I'm actually trying this:
git diff --no-index --color --ignore-all-space <file1> <file2>
but when some html tags are collapsed all on one line (instead of one per line and tabulated) git-diff detect is as a difference (while for me it is not).
<html><head><title>TITLE</title><meta ......
is different from
<html>
<head>
<title>TITLE</title>
<meta ......
What option do I miss to accomplish what I need and threat as if it was the same?
Answer
git diff supports comparing files line by line or word by word, and also supports defining what makes a word. Here you can define every non-space character as a word to do the comparison. In this way, it will ignore all spaces including white-spcae, tab, line-break and carrige-return as what you need.
To achieve it, there's a perfect option --word-diff-regex, and just set it --word-diff-regex=[^[:space:]]. Refer to doc for detail.
git diff --no-index --word-diff-regex=[^[:space:]] <file1> <file2>
Here's an example. I created two files, with a.html as follows:
<html><head><title>TITLE</title><meta>
With b.html as follows:
<html>
<head>
<title>TI==TLE</title>
<meta>
By running
git diff --no-index --word-diff-regex=[^[:space:]] a.html b.html
It highlights the difference of TITLE and TI{+==+}TLE in the two files in plain mode as follows. You can also specify --word-diff=<mode> to display results in different modes. The mode can be color, plain, porcelain and none, and with plain as default.
diff --git a/d.html b/a.html
index df38a78..306ed3e 100644
--- a/d.html
+++ b/a.html
@@ -1 +1,4 @@
<html>
<head>
<title>TI{+==+}TLE</title>
<meta>