title: What can cause git to mess with character encoding?
body: <p><em><strong>Edit:</em></strong> git does not mess with character encoding. This is still here to share knowlege and avoid others making the same mistake.</p>
  
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  <p><strong>The context</strong>: My enterprise uses an svn repository. I'm using git-svn as a client to interact with this repository. All text files in the project are (and must be) encoded with windows default encoding (cp-....). I use git-extensions, and sometimes the command line to pilot git.</p>
  
  <p><strong>What I did</strong>: During the last 3 days, I was working on a new feature, and I did a number of local commits. Finally i squashed all these commits into a single one using an interactive rebase, then i used git svn dcommit to push everything on the svn repository in a single commit.</p>
  
  <p><strong>What happened then</strong>: A collegue told me that all accents were messed up in the files that I modified, and in the new files after my commit. I had already commited text files with accents in the same repository with my installation of git + svn before, and it's the first time I face this issue.</p>
  
  <p><strong>My investigation</strong>:I did the following things to investigate: opened the files with notepad++, and tried the most current encodings (including windows default and UTF-8) to view them: none of them could display accents properly, and different accents are always rendered by the same sequence of strange glyphs.</p>
  
  <p><strong>The temporary workaround</strong>:I quickly created a revert commit with git extension and "dcommited" it. </p>
  
  <p><strong>The question</strong>:My enterprise svn repository is OK, but now i have the two following problems to solve:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Understand what happened with the characters with accents</li>
  <li>Retrieve my work from the SVN history and commit it in a proper way (if possible without reviewing manually all the characters with accents)</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Can anybody provide some clues (i'm rather new to git) ?</p>