Re: non-US-ASCII file names (e.g. Hiragana) on Windows

[Reece Dunn <msclrhd@googlemail.com>]

2009/11/28 Thomas Singer <thomas.singer@syntevo.com>:
>
> When launching 'git status' from the git shell (msys 1.6.5.1.1367.gcd48 from
> 7zip-bundle) it only shows me 4 question marks. I would have expected to see
> the non-displayable characters escaped like it did with the umlauts on OS X.
>
> Even adding fails:
>
> $ git add .
> fatal: unable to stat '????': No such file or directory
>
> What should I do to make Git recognize these characters?

This is a bug in git's character encoding/conversion logic. It looks
like git is taking the source string and converting it to ascii to be
displayed on the console output (e.g. by using the WideCharToMultiByte
conversion API) -- these APIs will use a '?' character for characters
that it cannot map to the target character encoding (like the Hiragana
characters that you are using).

SetConsoleOutputCP can be used to change the console output codepage
[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686036%28VS.85%29.aspx] and
SetConsoleCP is the equivalent for input
[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686013%28VS.85%29.aspx].
e.g.

    SetConsoleCP(CP_UTF8);
    SetConsoleOutputCP(CP_UTF8);

should make the console process UTF-8 characters, so git shouldn't
need to do any character conversions on Windows when reading/writing
it's data.

NOTE: I have not tested this, just noting what I have found via Google.

- Reece