Akatombo Web Log
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Ignore whitespace in a Subversion diff
Doing some work on a software project, in which part of the modifications I’m doing involve changing the indents on the code to make it conform to the coding conventions I follow and make it easier to easily read the code at a glance. When I have finished doing that though, I want to go back and make sure I haven’t inadvertently screwed something up in the actual code while I was changing the spacing.
svn diff doesn’t have a built in option for ignoring whitespace, but gnu diff does, so we use that.
to use a different diff command us the --diff-cmd parameter to svn diff, and to pass options to that command use the -x parameter.
If I was going to run the command in gnu diff directly I would use diff -uw /path/to/file1 /path/to/file2
In svn I want to diff against the latest version in the working copy (BASE) so I only need to pass in the file to diff and no revision info
Here is the command:
svn diff --diff-cmd diff -x -uw /path/to/file
Now at some point I have to see if I can figure out how to hack the subversion bundle for textmate to make that option available to me in the nice html highlighted view.
- Posted by Hugo Salgado
Thanks UtraBob. I was trying to obtain the same behaviour.
But do you know how to make it the default diff command inside subversion? I tried to use the ‘diff-cmd’ helper line in ~/.subversion/config file, but it don’t allow to pass the extra arguments to diff.Finally i’m using a workaround… using a shell script that calls the external diff with the correct parameters -uw, and in .subversion/config i use this shell script as diff-cmd :(
July 4th, 2006 11:18 PM - Posted by UltraBob
Wow this comment is almost exactly a year old, but I don’t remember seeing it when it came in. Sorry for having not replied. Did you ever figure out how to make that the default behavior because I don’t know off the top of my head.
July 9th, 2007 10:08 PM - Posted by Matt
You can set the TextMate environment variable (in Preferences/Advanced) and add whichever option(s) you’d like passed to the diff command:
TM_SVN_DIFF_CMD --> diff --extensions “-b -u”
September 8th, 2007 03:07 AM - Posted by steveo
I simply made a bash shell alias to use when I want to use this command:
alias svndw=’svn diff --diff-cmd diff -x -uw’
September 12th, 2007 11:43 PM - Posted by UltraBob
Good call! That has given me an idea for a bunch of other things I’m working on at the moment. Amazing how something like that can awaken a ton of neural pathways and start one off in a completely new direction.
September 12th, 2007 11:51 PM - Posted by steveo
Cool beans. Sometimes it’s the simple stuff.
September 12th, 2007 11:58 PM - Posted by Joe Maller
Matt’s settings from comment #3 worked almost perfectly for me. I ended up with the following:
TM_SVN_DIFF_CMD -> /usr/bin/diff --extensions “-bu”
For whatever reason, the ‘-u’ was showing up as a commit file in TextMate.
Remember to check for curly quotes.
April 9th, 2008 04:24 AM - Posted by rocko
What about
svn diff -x [-u | -b | -w | --ignore-eol-style]
The diff engine internal to Subversion can now ignore whitespace and eol-style when computing the diff.(since subversion 1.4)
May 29th, 2008 04:06 PM