Subject: Encoding of git diff --name-only stdout

Andrey Bienkowski· Apr 6, 2021, 12:20 UTC · lore

Hi. I want to parse the output of git diff --name-only and git diff --name-status, but the documentation https://git-scm.com/docs/git-diff does not say what encoding it is in. Is it always utf8 on all platforms? If not is there a flag to make it so? Once I get an answer to this question I'll submit a PR to add the missing documentation. -- Andrey Bienkowski

Jeff King· Apr 6, 2021, 14:54 UTC · re: Andrey Bienkowski · lore

Re: Subject: Encoding of git diff --name-only stdout

On Tue, Apr 06, 2021 at 12:20:45PM +0000, Andrey Bienkowski wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Hi. I want to parse the output of git diff --name-only and git diff
> --name-status, but the documentation https://git-scm.com/docs/git-diff
> does not say what encoding it is in. Is it always utf8 on all
> platforms? If not is there a flag to make it so? Once I get an answer
> to this question I'll submit a PR to add the missing documentation.

There's some discussion in Documentation/i18n.txt, which is included in various manpages (e.g., https://git-scm.com/docs/git-log#_discussion) but it doesn't seem to be mentioned in git-diff.

The short answer is: mostly utf8, but historically on platforms that don't care (like Linux) you could get away with other encodings.

-Peff