Re: [PATCH] dir: allow a BOM at the beginning of exclude files

> Hi Carlos,
> 
> On 2015-04-16 16:05, Carlos Martín Nieto wrote:
> > Some text editors like Notepad or LibreOffice write an UTF-8 BOM in
> > order to indicate that the file is Unicode text rather than whatever the
> > current locale would indicate.
> > 
> > If someone uses such an editor to edit a gitignore file, we are left
> > with those three bytes at the beginning of the file. If we do not skip
> > them, we will attempt to match a filename with the BOM as prefix, which
> > won't match the files the user is expecting.
> > 
> > ---
> > 
> > If you're wondering how I came up with LibreOffice, I was doing a
> > workshop recently and one of the participants was not content with the
> > choice of vim or nano, so he opened LibreOffice to edit the gitignore
> > file with confusing consequences.
> > 
> > This codepath doesn't go as far as the config code in validating that
> > we do not have a partial BOM which would mean there's some invalid
> > content, but we don't really have invalid content any other way, as
> > we're just dealing with a list of paths in the file.
> 
> Yeah, users are entertaining!
> 
> I agree that this is a good patch. *Maybe* we would need the same handling in more places, in which case it might make sense to refactor the test into its own function.