Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.
• The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences
of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level.
• Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This
applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well
as path names in command line arguments, environment
variables and config files (.git/config (see git-config(1)),
gitignore(5), gitattributes(5) and gitmodules(5)).
Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as
sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding
conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using
non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and
file systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings.
However, repositories created on such systems will not work
properly on UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows)
and vice versa. Additionally, many Git-based tools simply
assume path names to be UTF-8 and will fail to display other
encodings correctly.
• Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other
extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes
ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32, EBCDIC
and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, EUC-x,
CP9xx etc.).
Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in
UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to force
UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project
find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git does not
forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.
1. git commit and git commit-tree issues a warning if the commit
log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8
string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy
encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitEncoding
in .git/config file, like this:
[i18n]
commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1
Commit objects created with the above setting record the
value of i18n.commitEncoding in its encoding header. This is
to help other people who look at them later. Lack of this
header implies that the commit log message is encoded in
UTF-8.
2. git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding
header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message
into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the
desired output encoding with i18n.logOutputEncoding in
.git/config file, like this:
[i18n]
logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1
If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of
i18n.commitEncoding is used instead.
Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log
message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object
level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible
operation.
