!SideDiff: Regex to Remove Assembler Comments ?

The !SideDiff utility is very useful from comparing two Basic files. I’m using !SideDiff for comparing different versions of the !ARM_Debug main module, which are large Basic files containing ARM assembler.

!Sidediff supports ‘regex’ for text files. So I can easily convert two similar files to Basic text for subsequent comparison. However, most of the differences that !Sidediff finds are just my comments, as I’m going through trying to comment Theo’s original code.

I’m using the ‘;’ character to denote the start of a comment whilst in the Basic assembler.

Q. What regex command will remove these assembler comments from the ‘Diff’ comparison ?

Q. Does the !SideDiff regex functionality still work on Risc OS 5 ? I tried a few regexes, but nothing seemed to work :-(

Ralph

My reading of the SideDiff 2.44 Help is that the ‘regex’ syntax is only used to specify what type of line to consider as the start of a section so it can be displayed in the ‘Context Header’ lines for a difference.

I can see no indication that it can be used for excluding part of whole of a line if a ; is found, or if the regex can include all or just part of the regular expression syntax.

From !Help it seems that ‘Match regex’ uses the GNUdiff -F option, which seems to set for each chunk of differences, show some of the last preceding line that matches regexp

I think your best bet would be to write a litttle program which removed your assembler comments for the compare from the BASIC code. I have some very similar things if of interest.

I can see no indication that it can be used for excluding part of whole of a line if a ; is found, or if the regex can include all or just part of the regular expression syntax.

From !Help it seems that ‘Match regex’ uses the GNUdiff -F option, which seems to set for each chunk of differences, show some of the last preceding line that matches regexp

Thanks Martin. I won’t waste my time further trying random ‘regex’ commands. But I will look further at how !SideDiff interfaces with the ‘Diff’ module. In particular I’ll investigate whether the ‘!Sed’ utility can be used.

On my RPi5 I use Kdiff3 with the following Diff Settings:

Preprocessor command: sed ‘s/;/\/\//’
Line-matching preprocessor command: sed ‘s/;/\/\//’

I think your best bet would be to write a litttle program which removed your assembler comments for the compare from the BASIC code. I have some very similar things if of interest.

Yes – I could update the !SideDiff !RunImage Basic programme and intercept where the filenames are entered. Create two new files (say ‘1’ and ‘2’) sans comments, and send these to ‘Diff’ for comparison.

Many thanks – your comments were very helpful.

Ralph