Ignore Section

[solaceten]

Sorry if this has been asked before - I searched for some time but did not see any mention of this...

I use winmerge to compare files - sometimes, there is a need to ignore a specific section which may be missing from one side - for example, a staging site file on the Left that has notes in it, but a live site file on the Right that does not need these notes.

Is there a way to mark such a section / number of lines as to be ignored - and then the file can be returned as "equal" in the file / folder list?

This is useful because when comparing folders with lots of files, currently if a file has differences, it is obvious as it shows up with a red icon "files are different". However, if they are the same - except for "marked as ignored" sections - they could then be shown as "Identical" or perhaps even a new status of "Identical (with marked sections).

This would be very helpful as visual aid in folder list with many hundreds of files to compare.

Thank you for your time.

[sdottaka]

If there is a specific marker at the beginning of each line in that section, you can use WinMerge's Line Filters feature to ignore lines containing that specific marker (in this example, ===).

However, if there is no specific marker at the beginning of the lines, unfortunately, you won't be able to achieve the expected results with the current functionality of WinMerge.