| Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic. |
| |
| - The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences |
| of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core |
| level. |
| |
| - Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This |
| applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as |
| path names in command line arguments, environment variables |
| and config files (`.git/config` (see linkgit:git-config[1]), |
| linkgit:gitignore[5], linkgit:gitattributes[5] and |
| linkgit:gitmodules[5]). |
| + |
| Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as |
| sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding |
| conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using |
| non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file |
| systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However, |
| repositories created on such systems will not work properly on |
| UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa. |
| Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to |
| be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly. |
| |
| - Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other |
| extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes |
| ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but _not_ UTF-16/32, |
| EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, |
| EUC-x, CP9xx etc.). |
| |
| Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded |
| in UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to |
| force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular |
| project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git |
| does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in |
| mind. |
| |
| . 'git commit' and 'git commit-tree' issues |
| a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look |
| like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your |
| project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to |
| have i18n.commitencoding in `.git/config` file, like this: |
| + |
| ------------ |
| [i18n] |
| commitencoding = ISO-8859-1 |
| ------------ |
| + |
| Commit objects created with the above setting record the value |
| of `i18n.commitencoding` in its `encoding` header. This is to |
| help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header |
| implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8. |
| |
| . 'git log', 'git show', 'git blame' and friends look at the |
| `encoding` header of a commit object, and try to re-code the |
| log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can |
| specify the desired output encoding with |
| `i18n.logoutputencoding` in `.git/config` file, like this: |
| + |
| ------------ |
| [i18n] |
| logoutputencoding = ISO-8859-1 |
| ------------ |
| + |
| If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of |
| `i18n.commitencoding` is used instead. |
| |
| Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log |
| message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit |
| object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a |
| reversible operation. |