Ignore any blank space or line break in git-diff
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.htmlIt 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.htmlindex df38a78..306ed3e 100644--- a/d.html+++ b/a.html@@ -1 +1,4 @@<html> <head> <title>TI{+==+}TLE</title> <meta>
Executing command git diff --help gives some options like
--ignore-cr-at-eol Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a comparison.--ignore-space-at-eol Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.-b, --ignore-space-change Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.-w, --ignore-all-space Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.--ignore-blank-lines Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.Which you can combine according to your need, Below command worked for me
git diff --ignore-blank-lines --ignore-all-space --ignore-cr-at-eol