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Users who want UTF-16 files in the working tree set the .gitattributes like this: test.txt working-tree-encoding=UTF-16 The unicode standard itself defines 3 allowed ways how to encode UTF-16. The following 3 versions convert all back to 'g' 'i' 't' in UTF-8: a) UTF-16, without BOM, big endian: $ printf "\000g\000i\000t" | iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 | od -c 0000000 g i t b) UTF-16, with BOM, little endian: $ printf "\377\376g\000i\000t\000" | iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 | od -c 0000000 g i t c) UTF-16, with BOM, big endian: $ printf "\376\377\000g\000i\000t" | iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 | od -c 0000000 g i t Git uses libiconv to convert from UTF-8 in the index into ITF-16 in the working tree. After a checkout, the resulting file has a BOM and is encoded in "UTF-16", in the version (c) above. This is what iconv generates, more details follow below. iconv (and libiconv) can generate UTF-16, UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE: d) UTF-16 $ printf 'git' | ico...
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