How do I make Git diff ignore version number changes?

Question

Is there a way to remove version number change noise from a Git diff like this one? Specifically if a line only contains changes from one number to another can I set up Git diff to ignore it?

Answer 1

I think this can be achieved using git-diff --word-diff-regex=[^0-9] (see [^0-9] in action). For a more complex pattern you'll need a more complex regex but, except recursion, everything is possible with regex.

From Git - git-diff --word-diff-regex documentation

--word-diff-regex=

Use < regex > to decide what a word is, instead of considering runs of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies --word-diff unless it was already enabled.

Every non-overlapping match of the < regex > is considered a word. Anything between these matches is considered whitespace and ignored(!) for the purposes of finding differences. You may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regular expression to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters. A match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at the newline.

For example, --word-diff-regex=. will treat each character as a word and, correspondingly, show differences character by character.

The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, see gitattributes[5] or git-config[1]. Giving it explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.

See also

• Git - git-diff --word-diff