[bug-diffutils] diff on partial lines?

[Mathias Koerber]

Is there an option to have gdiff only consider a part of a line
(specified either as: before/after/between occurrances of a given
delimiter, or from/up-to a given character position etc) of a line
(but then to show the complete line(s) in the output)?

I currently have files to compare that include timestamps (which are
known to have changed). I would like to compare everything but the
timestamps. I can use tools like 'cut' or so to easily move them around
(to the back) of a line, but diff would have to ignore them there. I
still need to see the timestamp in the diff output though, it just
should not be the sole determinator for a changed line..

The alternative is of course to write a perl script to
split the data, compare only the important parts, but that would need
adjustments for each use and not be as performant as I suspect a
built-in ability to only consider certain parts of a line would be.