Filtering a diff with a regular expression

Question

It seems that it would be extremely handy to be able to filter a diff so that trivial changes are not displayed. I would like to write a regular expression which would be ru

Answer 1

If the goal is minimize trivial differences, you might consider our SmartDifferencer tool.

These tools compare the language syntax, not the layout, so many trivial changes (layout, modified comments, even changed radix on numbers) are ignored and not reported. Each tool has a full language parser; there's a version for many languages, including PHP.

It won't handle the example $FOO[abc] as being "semantically identical" to $FOO["abc"], because they are not. If abc actaully has a definition as as constant, then $FOO["abc"] is not semantically equivalent.