git-diff to ignore ^M

user_78336 0
Viewed 428751

In a project where some of the files contains ^M as newline separators. Diffing these files are apparently impossible, since git-diff sees it as the entire file is just a single line.

How does one diff with the previous version?

Is there an option like "treat ^M as newline when diffing" ?

prompt> git-diff "HEAD^" -- MyFile.as 
diff --git a/myproject/MyFile.as b/myproject/MyFile.as
index be78321..a393ba3 100644
--- a/myproject/MyFile.cpp
+++ b/myproject/MyFile.cpp
@@ -1 +1 @@
-<U+FEFF>import flash.events.MouseEvent;^Mimport mx.controls.*;^Mimport mx.utils.Delegate
\ No newline at end of file
+<U+FEFF>import flash.events.MouseEvent;^Mimport mx.controls.*;^Mimport mx.utils.Delegate
\ No newline at end of file
prompt>

UPDATE:

now I have written a Ruby script that checks out the latest 10 revisions and converts CR to LF.

require 'fileutils'

if ARGV.size != 3
  puts "a git-path must be provided"
  puts "a filename must be provided"
  puts "a result-dir must be provided"
  puts "example:"
  puts "ruby gitcrdiff.rb project/dir1/dir2/dir3/ SomeFile.cpp tmp_somefile"
  exit(1)
end

gitpath = ARGV[0]
filename = ARGV[1]
resultdir = ARGV[2]

unless FileTest.exist?(".git")
  puts "this command must be run in the same dir as where .git resides"
  exit(1)
end

if FileTest.exist?(resultdir)
  puts "the result dir must not exist"
  exit(1)
end
FileUtils.mkdir(resultdir)

10.times do |i|
  revision = "^" * i
  cmd = "git show HEAD#{revision}:#{gitpath}#{filename} | tr '\\r' '\\n' > #{resultdir}/#{filename}_rev#{i}"
  puts cmd 
  system cmd
end
newline git-diff diff git
12 Answers

GitHub suggests that you should make sure to only use \n as a newline character in git-handled repos. There's an option to auto-convert:

$ git config --global core.autocrlf true

Of course, this is said to convert crlf to lf, while you want to convert cr to lf. I hope this still works …

And then convert your files:

# Remove everything from the index
$ git rm --cached -r .

# Re-add all the deleted files to the index
# You should get lots of messages like: "warning: CRLF will be replaced by LF in <file>."
$ git diff --cached --name-only -z | xargs -0 git add

# Commit
$ git commit -m "Fix CRLF"

core.autocrlf is described on the man page.

Niko_525730

Try git diff --ignore-space-at-eol, or git diff --ignore-space-change, or git diff --ignore-all-space.

user_460580
user_12417620

If you just want a quick line that makes the git diff but does not show the different endings (thus the ^M) use the one in the first comments to the original question, it worked for me:

 git diff -b

Take into account that, in the long run, you should get your line endings configuration right, as all other answers suggest.

user_51087770

As noted by VonC, this has already been included in git 2.16+. Unfortunately, the name of the option (--ignore-cr-at-eol) differs from the one used by GNU diff that I'm used to (--strip-trailing-cr).

When I was confronted with this problem, my solution was to invoke GNU diff instead of git's built-in diff, because my git is older than 2.16. I did that using this command line:

GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF='diff -u --strip-trailing-cr "$2" "$5";true;#' git diff --ext-diff

That allows using --strip-trailing-cr and any other GNU diff options.

There's also this other way:

git difftool -y -x 'diff -u --strip-trailing-cr'

but it doesn't use the configured pager settings, which is why I prefer the former.

user_24284870

If the git patch is already generated in a windows machine and you are using it you can format the patch with dos2unix utility in Linux.

find -name "*.patch"| xargs dos2unix

This will solve the ^M at EOL and you will be able to git apply patch in your linux machine.

user_191866900
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