1Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic. 2 3 - The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences 4 of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core 5 level. 6 7 - Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This 8 applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as 9 path names in command line arguments, environment variables 10 and config files (`.git/config` (see linkgit:git-config[1]), 11 linkgit:gitignore[5], linkgit:gitattributes[5] and 12 linkgit:gitmodules[5]). 13+ 14Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as 15sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding 16conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using 17non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file 18systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However, 19repositories created on such systems will not work properly on 20UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa. 21Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to 22be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly. 23 24 - Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other 25 extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes 26 ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but _not_ UTF-16/32, 27 EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, 28 EUC-x, CP9xx etc.). 29 30Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded 31in UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to 32force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular 33project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git 34does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in 35mind. 36 37. 'git commit' and 'git commit-tree' issues 38 a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look 39 like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your 40 project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to 41 have i18n.commitencoding in `.git/config` file, like this: 42+ 43------------ 44[i18n] 45 commitencoding = ISO-8859-1 46------------ 47+ 48Commit objects created with the above setting record the value 49of `i18n.commitencoding` in its `encoding` header. This is to 50help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header 51implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8. 52 53. 'git log', 'git show', 'git blame' and friends look at the 54 `encoding` header of a commit object, and try to re-code the 55 log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can 56 specify the desired output encoding with 57 `i18n.logoutputencoding` in `.git/config` file, like this: 58+ 59------------ 60[i18n] 61 logoutputencoding = ISO-8859-1 62------------ 63+ 64If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of 65`i18n.commitencoding` is used instead. 66 67Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log 68message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit 69object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a 70reversible operation.