Make git diff show UTF8 encoded characters properly

Question

I have a file with Swedish characters in it (åäö) encoded with UTF8.

If I cat the file it displays fine, but if I do git diff the special c

Answer 1

@matt and @twalberg were correct. The file wasn't actually UTF-8 encoded. Trying to figure this out wasn't helped by the fact that my terminal (hterm) can't input åäö properly (but it can display and copy/paste them)...

iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 in.txt > out_utf-8.txt

solved my issue

Answer 2

git log will be opened by less not vi.

So you should set lang to less.

$ export LESSCHARSET=utf-8 && git log

Answer 3

git is dumping out raw bytes. In this case, it doesn't care what your file's encoding is. The highlighted <F6> you're seeing is coming from less, which is presumably configured as your PAGER. Try setting:

LESSCHARSET=UTF-8