Unicode (utf-8) with git-bash

Question

I\'m having some trouble getting unicode to work for git-bash (on windows 7). I have tried many things without success. Although, I\'m not quite sure what is responsible to

Answer 1

I can see that there are some problems with character encoding with git bash for windows. Less for the work with git itself and the tools it ships with (curl, cat, grep etc.). I didn't run into problems with these over the years character encoding related.

Normally with each new version problems get better resolved. E.g. with the version from a year ago, I couldn't enter characters like "ä" into the shell, so it was not possible to write

echo "ä"

To quickly test if UTF-8 is supported and at which level. A workaround is to write the byte-sequences octal:

$ echo -e "\0303\0244"
ä

Still issues I do have when I execute my windows php.exe binary to output text:

$ php -r 'echo "\xC3\xA4";'
ä

This does not give the the "ä" in the terminal, but it outputs "ä" instead. The workaround I have for that is, that I wrap the php command in a bash-script that processes the output through cat:

#!/bin/bash

{ php.exe "$@" 2>&1 1>&3 | cat 1>&2; } 3>&1 | cat

^{ref. reg. stdout + stderr cat}

This magically then makes php working again:

$ php -r 'echo "\xC3\xA4";'
ä

Applies to

$ git --version
git version 1.9.4.msysgit.1

I must admit I miss deeper understanding why this is all the way it is. But I'm finally happy that I found a workaround to use php in git bash with UTF-8 support.