Re: [RFC PATCH] make diff --color-words customizable

[Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1604 bytes --]

Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Jan 2009, Thomas Rast wrote:
> 
> > Allows for user-configurable word splits when using --color-words. This 
> > can make the diff more readable if the regex is configured according to 
> > the language of the file.
> > 
> > For now the (POSIX extended) regex must be set via the environment
> > GIT_DIFF_WORDS_REGEX.  Each (non-overlapping) match of the regex is
> > considered a word.  Anything characters not matched are considered
> > whitespace.  For example, for C try
> > 
> >   GIT_DIFF_WORDS_REGEX='[0-9]+|[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*|(\+|-|&|\|){1,2}|\S'
[...]
> Interesting idea.  However, I think it would be better to do the opposite, 
> have _word_ patterns.  And even better to have _one_ pattern.

I'm not sure I understand.  It _is_ a single pattern.  The examples
just have several cases to distinguish various semantic groups that
can occur, as a sort of "half tokenizer".  (The C example isn't very
complete however.)

> BTW I think you could do what you intended to do with a _way_ smaller 
> and more intuitive patch.

How?

I don't think the existing mechanism, which just replaces all
whitespace with newlines and does a line diff to find out which words
changed, can "just" be adapted.  We will have to insert extra newlines
at points where the regex said to split a word, but where there was no
whitespace in the original content.  If there's a significantly easier
way to do that than I hacked up, please share.

Or maybe I got your original code all wrong?

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch


[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part. --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 197 bytes --]