Why does Git treat this text file as a binary file?
I wonder why git tells me this?
$ git diff MyFile.txt
diff --git a/MyFile.txt b/MyFile.txt
index d41a4f3..15dcfa2 100644
Binary files a/MyFile.txt and b/MyFile.txt differ
Aren't they text files?
I have checked the .gitattributes and it is empty. Why I am getting this message ?, I cannot get diffs as I use to anymore
ADDED :
I've noticed there is an @ in the file permissions, what is this ?, Could this be the reason ?
$ls -all
drwxr-xr-x 5 nacho4d staff 170 28 Jul 17:07 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 nacho4d staff 544 28 Jul 16:39 ..
-rw-r--r--@ 1 nacho4d staff 6148 28 Jul 16:15 .DS_Store
-rw-r--r--@ 1 nacho4d staff 746 28 Jul 17:07 MyFile.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 nacho4d staff 22538 5 Apr 16:18 OtherFile.txt
Answer
It simply means that when git inspects the actual content of the file (it doesn't know that any given extension is not a binary file - you can use the attributes file if you want to tell it explicitly - see the man pages).
Having inspected the file's contents it has seen stuff that isn't in basic ascii characters. Being UTF16 I expect that it will have 'funny' characters so it thinks it's binary.
There are ways of telling git if you have internationalisation (i18n) or extended character formats for the file. I'm not sufficiently up on the exact method for setting that - you may need to RT[Full]M ;-)
Edit: a quick search of SO found can-i-make-git-recognize-a-utf-16-file-as-text which should give you a few clues.