| 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` issue | |
| 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 their `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. |