CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitgithubdiff
SlyK
SlyK

Reputation: 185

How do I show a diff in GitHub for files perceived as 'binary'?

I have been trying to create my own mods for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in its proprietary scripting language, Witcher Script, which has .ws extension.

I have created a Git repo to track these changes, and I have updated both .gitattribute and .git/config files so that I can see git diff results on CLI:

  1. .gitattribute:
*.ws text
*.ws diff=localizablestrings
  1. .git/config:
[diff "localizablestrings"]
        textconv = "iconv -f utf-16 -t utf-8"

However, when I reach my repo on GitHub and try to see the changes I've done, I get this: enter image description here

Is there any setting on GitHub that I have to update so that GitHub can show the commit changes as text?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1275

Answers (1)

bk2204
bk2204

Reputation: 76409

As Joachim Sauer mentioned in the comments, this isn't possible. A file in UTF-16 is considered binary because it almost certainly contains NUL bytes. Part of the reason is because GitHub needs to actually render the diff, and things that aren't valid UTF-8 can't be rendered as-is in the page.

Note that the textconv commands are loaded into your config and not the repo, and as such, nobody else even has a copy of them. That's because running commands automatically based on the repository would be a colossal security risk, since someone could easily execute arbitrary code based on a malicious command.

If these files are really text files, just in UTF-16, consider instead storing them in UTF-8 and checking them out into the repository as UTF-16. You can do this with something like one of the following:

*.ws text working-tree-encoding=UTF-16
# If you need the non-standard variant that's always LE with BOM:
*.ws text working-tree-encoding=UTF-16LE-BOM

Note that if you need the line endings to be CRLF, you can add eol=crlf as well.

If you do that, then run git add --renormalize ., then things should render properly in GitHub.

Upvotes: 7

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