hg handles text file in unicode as binary file

Matt Mackall mpm at selenic.com
Sun Mar 30 15:37:09 CDT 2008


On Sun, 2008-03-30 at 20:58 +0200, Gábor Farkas wrote:
> ibn at ikeeper.cn wrote:
>  >
>  > hg handles text file in unicode as binary file ? no diff or cat ?
>  >
> 
> you have to define what you mean by "unicode".

Mercurial internally treats all files the same - a sequence of bytes.

But a couple functions (diff in particular) make an attempt to
distinguish between so-called text and binary files by searching for NUL
bytes in the data. As a UTF-16 file will have lots of NULs in it, hg
diff will refuse to process it unless you give it the -a switch.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.



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