Can't get git to play nice with iconv and utf-16

Question

I\'m trying to get git to recognize UTF-16 as text to allow me to diff and patch as text natively, but I\'m having trouble getting the textconv parameter to wor

Answer 1

Git 2.21 (Feb. 2019) adds a new encoding UTF-16LE-BOM: invented to force encoding to UTF-16 with BOM in little endian byte order, which cannot be directly generated by using iconv.

See commit aab2a1a (30 Jan 2019) by Torsten Bögershausen (tboegi).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 0fa3cc7, 07 Feb 2019)}

Support working-tree-encoding "UTF-16LE-BOM"

Users who want UTF-16 files in the working tree set the .gitattributes like this:

test.txt working-tree-encoding=UTF-16

The unicode standard itself defines 3 allowed ways how to encode UTF-16. The following 3 versions convert all back to 'g' 'i' 't' in UTF-8:

a) UTF-16, without BOM, big endian:
$ printf "\000g\000i\000t" | iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 | od -c
0000000    g   i   t

b) UTF-16, with BOM, little endian:
$ printf "\377\376g\000i\000t\000" | iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 | od -c
0000000    g   i   t

c) UTF-16, with BOM, big endian:
$ printf "\376\377\000g\000i\000t" | iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 | od -c
0000000    g   i   t

Git uses libiconv to convert from UTF-8 in the index into ITF-16 in the working tree.
After a checkout, the resulting file has a BOM and is encoded in "UTF-16", in the version (c) above.
This is what iconv generates, more details follow below.

iconv (and libiconv) can generate UTF-16, UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE:

d) UTF-16
$ printf 'git' | iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-16 | od -c
0000000  376 377  \0   g  \0   i  \0   t

e) UTF-16LE
$ printf 'git' | iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-16LE | od -c
0000000    g  \0   i  \0   t  \0

f)  UTF-16BE
$ printf 'git' | iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-16BE | od -c
0000000   \0   g  \0   i  \0   t

There is no way to generate version (b) from above in a Git working tree, but that is what some applications need.
(All fully unicode aware applications should be able to read all 3 variants, but in practice, we are not there yet).

When producing UTF-16 as an output, iconv generates the big endian version with a BOM. (big endian is probably chosen for historical reasons).

iconv can produce UTF-16 files with little endianess by using "UTF-16LE" as encoding, and that file does not have a BOM.

Not all users (especially under Windows) are happy with this.
Some tools are not fully unicode aware and can only handle version (b).

Today there is no way to produce version (b) with iconv (or libiconv).
Looking into the history of iconv, it seems as if version (c) will be used in all future iconv versions (for compatibility reasons).

Solve this dilemma and introduce a Git-specific "UTF-16LE-BOM".
libiconv can not handle the encoding, so Git pick it up, handles the BOM and uses libiconv to convert the rest of the stream. (UTF-16BE-BOM is added for consistency)