Re: Understanding and improving --word-diff

[Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com>]

On 08/11/2010, at 16:16, Matthijs Kooijman wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> I recently discovered --word-diff (or rather, --color-words and found
> --word-diff when I started to hack on the git master version) and I had
> hoped it would make the unified diffs generated by git-diff more
> readable.

[snip]

> Inexact output
> --------------
> Secondly, the --word-diff output currently never displays any changes to
> the non-word (whitespace) parts of a file. This makes sense for the
> LaTeX case, but sometimes you might want to get exact diff output
> instead. At first glance this seems possible by specifiying a word-regex
> of "." or something similar (i.e., make sure that the word regex matches
> everything). But this is problematic for newlines. The documentation
> states that stuff gets silently ignored if a newline ends up inside a
> word. For the --word-diff=color format, this is probably a fixed
> limitation of the otput format: you can't give a color to a newline (or
> a space, for that matter).

[snip]

> Porcelain format
> ----------------
> Lastly, the "porcelain" word-diff format seems a bit weird to me. Is
> the format specified somewhere, or are there any programs that use it
> currently? I couldn't find any users inside the git.git tree itself?
> 
> Looking at the format itself, it's a bit unclear to me what the ~ lines
> mean exactly. Commit 882749, which introduced the format says the mean
> "newlines in the input", but I'm not sure if this means the old file,
> new file or both.

I posted along similar lines back in September:

  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/156375

I found I couldn't really use the porcelain format due to information loss and ended up having to roll my own, parse the normal diff output and using that.

Cheers,
Wincent