git diff shows unicode symbols in angle brackets

Question

I have a file with unicode symbols (russian text). When I fix some typo I use git diff --color-words=. to see the changes I\'ve done.

In case of unicode

Answer 1

For several platforms setting LANG to C.UTF-8 (or en_US.UTF-8, etc.) would work:

$ echo '人' >test1.txt && echo '丁' >test2.txt
$ LANG=C.UTF-8 git diff --no-index --word-diff=plain --word-diff-regex=. -- test1.txt test2.txt
diff --git a/test1.txt b/test2.txt
index 3ef0891..3773917 100644
--- a/test1.txt
+++ b/test2.txt
@@ -1 +1 @@
[-人-]{+丁+}

However, LANG doesn't seem to be honored on some platforms (such as Git for Windows):

$ echo '人' >test1.txt && echo '丁' >test2.txt
$ LANG=C.UTF-8 git diff --no-index --word-diff=plain --word-diff-regex=. -- test1.txt test2.txt
diff --git a/test1.txt b/test2.txt
index 3ef0891..3773917 100644
--- a/test1.txt
+++ b/test2.txt
@@ -1 +1 @@
[--]{+<81>+}

A workaround on these platforms is to provide raw bytes for UTF-8 chars (e.g. $'[^\x80-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]*' for '.') to git diff:

$ echo '人' >test1.txt && echo '丁' >test2.txt
$ git diff --no-index --word-diff=plain --word-diff-regex=$'[^\x80-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]*' -- test1.txt test2.txt
diff --git a/test1.txt b/test2.txt
index 3ef0891..3773917 100644
--- a/test1.txt
+++ b/test2.txt
@@ -1 +1 @@
[-人-]{+丁+}