How Do I Use Beyond Compare: Introduction to Beyon
  • Forty things about Beyond Compare
  • Acknowledgements
  • Learn Beyond Compare in 5 Minutes
    • Quickstart: open two directories
    • Quickstart: open two files
    • Quickstart: move a file
    • Text Compare: understand the display
    • Downloads
  • Text Compare
    • How to use Beyond Compare for Text Compare
    • In Beyond Compare, what are unimportant differences?
    • Why no word-wrap ??
    • How to use Beyond Compare to confirm 100% replacement
    • Ignore Trivial Differences, Like Timestamps
  • Git
    • How to use Beyond Compare with Git
    • Do a roll-back to peek at your old code
    • Quickstart: Folder Merge
    • Why merge three folders?
    • Beyond Compare Three-Way Folder Merge Symbols Explained
    • How to compare two commits, both old, in Git
    • Git mergetool: merging three files.
    • How to recover an older version of your code with Git and Beyond Compare
    • Peeking under the hood at how Git does its thing
    • Getting better at Git
    • Find changes since last commit
    • Patches
    • How to configure Visual Studio to use Beyond Compare for Version Control
  • Scripts and the Command Line
    • How to use Beyond Compare in the Terminal
    • How to do an automatic backup every day
    • Write a Batch File That Will Start Several Syncs Simultaneously
    • Write a batch file that will start several text compares automatically
    • TL; DR
  • Table Compare
    • Quickstart: open a couple of Excel spreadsheets
    • Example: finding missing items in a pair of spreadsheets
    • Keys
    • Mismatched Columns
    • Longer example, opening .csv files
    • How to remove columns from a spreadsheet
    • Aligned vs Unaligned
    • Example: List of City Trees
  • Sync / Folders
    • Backup your entire computer (Part One)
    • Backup your entire computer (Part Two)
    • Backup, advanced
    • RegEx Examples: Filename Alignment Overide
    • Scan a lot or a little
  • Other
    • Peek
    • Binary
    • Undo
    • Colors
    • How to compare images
    • Report: Text Compare
    • Report: Table Compare
    • Looooonnnnngggg lines...
    • Binary: How to see the 1's and 0's
    • How to write your first script
    • How to find redundant or duplicate files
    • Minor Edge Cases
    • Shortcut Key
    • How to ignore parts of your file
    • Folder System Context Menus
    • About Evan Genest
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  • Ignoring headers, comments, RegExDates as unimportant
  • #1 Tell Beyond Compare to always skip the first x lines of all files
  • #2 For computer code, you can tell BC to detect the language and ignore comments in that language
  • #3 To ignore a date, you can make a Regular Expression

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How to ignore parts of your file

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Last updated 6 years ago

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Ignoring headers, comments, RegExDates as unimportant

Sometimes your files have some some trivial part that you want to ignore when using Beyond Compare. There are several ways to do this.

For this example we will look at a pair of files in C language:

#1 Tell Beyond Compare to always skip the first x lines of all files

This way is crude but easy.

From the menu:

1. Session->SessionSettings->Importance->EditGrammar->Grammar->[+]

2. Then choose Category->Lines. Set that window similar to mine below. Then, you must go and UNcheck the box that calls that rule important:

If you want BC to evaluate all of the files in a Folder Compare session using this rule:

3. You can choose Session->SessionSettings->Importance and select AlsoUpdateSessionDefaults

#2 For computer code, you can tell BC to detect the language and ignore comments in that language

By default, Beyond Compare detects many languages based on the dot extension on the filename, including C languages, Cobol, Delphi, Java, Javascript, Perl, Python, SQL, and visual Basic. More can be downloaded from Scooter Software. If your file is in one of these languages, Beyond Compare will automatically mark any comments as unimportant. When you look at your file, you will see red and blue color highlighting. The red is to show you the really significant things, the important differences. The blue color is to show you things that are different but that you might not care about, like different whitespace, different capitalizations, and, as we are interested in here, different comments. If you really want to not see the blue, unimportant differences, you can turn the highlighting from blue to nothing at all by hitting the MINOR button.

#3 To ignore a date, you can make a Regular Expression

The most computer-scienceish way to ignore things is with a mask or a regular expression. The mask is an asterisk wildcard combined with the string of the thing you are ignoring.

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