Re: change the filetype from binary to text after the file is commited to a git repo

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 24, 2017, 20:32 UTC
Message-ID: <20170724203215.nnktj55xyvqfmcvj@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <DBBA7352-5276-4972-A437-F27F5F4C2641@gmail.com>

On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 10:26:22PM +0200, tonka3100@gmail.com wrote:

> > I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to accomplish. If you're unhappy
> > with the file as utf-16, then you should probably convert to utf-8 as a
> > single commit (since the diff will otherwise be unreadable) and then
> > make further changes in utf-8.

Show 6 quoted lines

> That was exactly what i'm searching for. The utf-16 back in the days
> was by accident (thx to visual studio). So if the last commit and the
> acutal change are both utf-8 the diff should work again.  Just for my
> understanding. Git just take the bytes of the whole file on every
> commit, so there is no general problem with that, the size of the
> utf-16 is just twice as big as the utf-8 one, is that correct?

Right. The diff switching the encodings will be listed as "binary" (and you should write a good commit message explaining what's going on!), but then after that the changes to the utf-8 version will display as normal text. Git only looks at the actual bytes being diffed, not older versions of the file.

-Peff