Why does Git treat this text file as a binary file

Question

I wonder why git tells me this    git diff MyFile txt diff --git a MyFile txt b MyFile txt index d41a4f3  15dcfa2 100644 Binary files a MyFile txt and b MyFile txt differ  Aren t they text files  I have checked the  gitattributes and it is empty  Why I am getting this message    I cannot get diffs as I use to anymore ADDED   I ve noticed there is an   in the file permissions  what is this    Could this be the reason    ls -all drwxr-xr-x   5 nacho4d  staff    170 28 Jul 17 07   drwxr-xr-x  16 nacho4d  staff    544 28 Jul 16 39    -rw-r--r--   1 nacho4d  staff   6148 28 Jul 16 15  DS Store -rw-r--r--   1 nacho4d  staff    746 28 Jul 17 07 MyFile txt -rw-r--r--   1 nacho4d  staff  22538  5 Apr 16 18 OtherFile txt

User · Answer

I have had same problem  I found the thread when I search solution on google  still I don t find any clue  But I think I found the reason after studying  the below example will explain clearly my clue       echo  new text   gt  new txt     git add new txt     git commit -m  dummy    for now  the file new txt is considered as a text file       echo -e  newer text 000   gt  new txt     git diff   you will get this result  diff --git a new txt b new txt index fa49b07  410428c 100644 Binary files a new txt and b new txt differ   and try this  git diff -a   you will get below      diff --git a new txt b new txt     index fa49b07  9664e3f 100644     --- a new txt         b new txt        -1  1        -new file      newer text

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If you have not set the type of a file  Git tries to determine it automatically and a file with really long lines and maybe some wide characters  e g  Unicode  is treated as binary  With the  gitattributes file you can define how Git interpretes the file  Setting the diff attribute manually lets Git interprete the file content as text and will do an usual diff   Just add a  gitattributes to your repository root folder and set the diff attribute to the paths or files  Here s an example   src Acme DemoBundle Resources public js i18n   diff doc Help NothingToSay yml                      diff   css                                          diff   If you want to check if there are attributes set on a file  you can do that with the help of git check-attr  git check-attr --all -- src my file txt   Another nice reference about Git attributes could be found here

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I had an instance where  gitignore contained a double  r  carriage return  sequence by purpose   That file was identified as binary by git  Adding a  gitattributes file helped      gitattributes file  gitignore diff

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I had this same problem after editing one of my files in a new editor   Turns out the new editor used a different encoding  Unicode  than my old editor  UTF-8    So I simply told my new editor to save my files with UTF-8 and then git showed my changes properly again and didn t see it as a binary file   I think the problem was simply that git doesn t know how to compare files of different encoding types  So the encoding type that you use really doesn t matter  as long as it remains consistent   I didn t test it  but I m sure if I would have just committed my file with the new Unicode encoding  the next time I made changes to that file it would have shown the changes properly and not detected it as binary  since then it would have been comparing two Unicode encoded files  and not a UTF-8 file to a Unicode file   You can use an app like Notepad   to easily see and change the encoding type of a text file  Open the file in Notepad   and use the Encoding menu in the toolbar

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Change the Aux js to another name  like Sig js     The source tree still shows it as a binary file  but you can stage add  it and commit

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I just spent several hours going through everything on this list trying to work out why one of the test projects in my solution wasn t adding any tests to the explorer   It turned out in my case that somehow  probably due to a poor git merge somewhere  that VS had lost a reference the project altogether  It was still building but I noticed that it only built the dependancies   I then noticed that it wasn t showing up in the dependencies list itself  so I removed and re-added the test project and all my tests showed up finally

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It simply means that when git inspects the actual content of the file  it doesn t know that any given extension is not a binary file - you can use the attributes file if you want to tell it explicitly - see the man pages    Having inspected the file s contents it has seen stuff that isn t in basic ascii characters  Being UTF16 I expect that it will have  funny  characters so it thinks it s binary   There are ways of telling git if you have internationalisation  i18n  or extended character formats for the file  I m not sufficiently up on the exact method for setting that - you may need to RT Full M  -    Edit  a quick search of SO found can-i-make-git-recognize-a-utf-16-file-as-text which should give you a few clues

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Git will even determine that it is binary if you have one super-long line in your text file  I broke up a long String  turning it into several source code lines  and suddenly the file went from being  binary  to a text file that I could see  in SmartGit    So don t keep typing too far to the right without hitting  Enter  in your editor - otherwise later on Git will think you have created a binary file

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If git check-attr --all -- src my file txt indicates that your file is flagged as binary  and you haven t set it as binary in  gitattributes  check for it in   git info attributes

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This is also caused  on Windows at least  by text files that have UTF-8 with BOM encoding  Changing the encoding to regular UTF-8 immediately made Git see the file as type text

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I was having this issue where Git GUI and SourceTree was treating Java JS files as binary and thus wouldn   t show a diff  Creating a file named attributes in  git info with following content solved the problem    java diff   js diff   pl diff   txt diff   ts diff   html diff   sh diff   xml diff  If you would like this to apply to all repositories  then you can add the file attributes in  HOME  config git attributes

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Try using file to view the encoding details  reference   cd directory of interest file    It produces useful output like this    file   CR6Series stats resaved dat  ASCII text  with very long lines  with CRLF line terminators CR6Series stats utf8 dat     UTF-8 Unicode  with BOM  text  with very long lines  with CRLF line terminators CR6Series stats dat          ASCII text  with very long lines  with CRLF line terminators readme md                    ASCII text  with CRLF line terminators

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We had this case where an  html file was seen as binary whenever we tried to make changes in it  Very uncool to not see diffs  To be honest  I didn t checked all the solutions here but what worked for us was the following    Removed the file  actually moved it to my Desktop  and commited the git deletion  Git says Deleted file with mode 100644  Regular  Binary file differs Re-added the file  actually moved it from my Desktop back into the project   Git says New file with mode 100644  Regular  1 chunk  135 insertions  0 deletions The file is now added as a regular text file   From now on  any changes I made in the file is seen as a regular text diff  You could also squash these commits  1  2  and 3 being the actual change you make  but I prefer to be able to see in the future what I did  Squashing 1  amp  2 will show a binary change

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I had a similar issue as I pasted some text from a binary Kafka message  which inserted non-visible character and caused git to think the file is binary  I found the offending characters by searching the file using regex    -  n r t       match characters in this set   match characters not in this set  -  matches all characters from      space  to      n newline  r carriage return  t tab   close set   match one or more of these characters

[git] Why does Git treat this text file as a binary file?

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