# Re: OT: character encodings (was: Linux 2.6.20-rc4)

4 messages from 2007-01-07 to 2007-01-08. Participants: Sean, Jan Engelhardt, Xavier Bestel, David Woodhouse.
Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/6270

## Sean, 2007-01-07 20:15

Subject: Re: OT: character encodings (was: Linux 2.6.20-rc4)
Message-ID: <20070107151514.be9430b1.seanlkml@sympatico.ca>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/20070107151514.be9430b1.seanlkml%40sympatico.ca
In-Reply-To: <20070107200553.GA15101@redhat.com>

```
On Sun, 7 Jan 2007 15:05:53 -0500
Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> wrote:

Including the Git list...

> On Sun, Jan 07, 2007 at 07:17:30PM +0000, Russell King wrote:
> 
>  > commit 24ebead82bbf9785909d4cf205e2df5e9ff7da32
>  > tree 921f686860e918a01c3d3fb6cd106ba82bf4ace6
>  > parent 264166e604a7e14c278e31cadd1afb06a7d51a11
>  > author Rafa³ Bilski <rafalbilski@interia.pl> 1167691774 +0100
>  > committer Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> 1167799119 -0500
>  > 
>  > and looking at that "author" closer with od:
>  > 
>  > 0000140 74 68 6f 72 20 52 61 66 61 b3 20 42 69 6c 73 6b
>  >           t   h   o   r       R   a   f   a   ³       B   i   l   s   k
>  > 
>  > clearly not UTF-8.  I doubt whether any of the commits I do on my
>  > en_GB ISO-8859-1 systems end up being UTF-8 encoded.
> 
> This has been bugging me for a while.
> Viewing the mail I applied in mutt shows his name correctly as Rafał
> Applying it with git-applymbox and viewing the log on master.kernel.org
> with git log shows Rafa<B3>   And then later when put into email
> it turns into Rafa³
> 
>  > But the point is there is charset damage which has happened _long_ before
>  > Linus' action.  There is no character set defined for the contents of git
>  > repositories, and as such the output of the git tools can not be
>  > interpreted as any one single character set.
> 
> If there's something I should be doing when I commit that I'm not,
> I'll be happy to change my scripts.  My $LANG is set to en_US.UTF-8
> which should DTRT to the best of my knowledge, but clearly, that isn't
> the case.

```

## Jan Engelhardt, 2007-01-07 20:40

Subject: Re: OT: character encodings (was: Linux 2.6.20-rc4)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0701072139520.4365@yvahk01.tjqt.qr>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/Pine.LNX.4.61.0701072139520.4365%40yvahk01.tjqt.qr
In-Reply-To: <20070107151514.be9430b1.seanlkml@sympatico.ca>

```

>On Sun, 7 Jan 2007 15:05:53 -0500
>Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> If there's something I should be doing when I commit that I'm not,
>> I'll be happy to change my scripts.  My $LANG is set to en_US.UTF-8
>> which should DTRT to the best of my knowledge, but clearly, that isn't
>> the case.

No, LC_CTYPE defines what charset you use. (I may be wrong, though.)


	-`J'
-- 

```

## Xavier Bestel, 2007-01-07 21:07

Subject: Re: OT: character encodings (was: Linux 2.6.20-rc4)
Message-ID: <1168204064.3806.40.camel@bip.parateam.prv>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/1168204064.3806.40.camel%40bip.parateam.prv
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0701072139520.4365@yvahk01.tjqt.qr>

```
Le dimanche 07 janvier 2007 à 21:40 +0100, Jan Engelhardt a écrit :
> >On Sun, 7 Jan 2007 15:05:53 -0500
> >Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> >> If there's something I should be doing when I commit that I'm not,
> >> I'll be happy to change my scripts.  My $LANG is set to en_US.UTF-8
> >> which should DTRT to the best of my knowledge, but clearly, that isn't
> >> the case.
> 
> No, LC_CTYPE defines what charset you use. (I may be wrong, though.)

IIRC LANG is a superset for all LC_* - i.e. if only LANG is defined, it
sets all your locales, but you can individually set the charset, numeric
format, date format, etc.

	Xav

```

## David Woodhouse, 2007-01-08 01:53

Subject: Re: OT: character encodings
Message-ID: <1168221232.14763.80.camel@shinybook.infradead.org>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/1168221232.14763.80.camel%40shinybook.infradead.org
In-Reply-To: <45A17645.1030905@imap.cc>

```
On Sun, 2007-01-07 at 23:37 +0100, Tilman Schmidt wrote:
> > That depends on your point of view.  David's assertion was that git
> > internally uses UTF-8.
> 
> Well, I'm inclined to say he was wrong. Git internally is completely
> oblivious to character encoding.

See the 'i18n.commitencoding' property, stored in the repository config
and defaulting to UTF-8. Git is certainly capable of converting to its
internal storage encoding when you commit; if it doesn't do so by
default then that would be a bug.

-- 
dwmw2

```