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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T13:05:29+00:00

I’ve got a post-commit hook script that performs a SVN update of a working

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I’ve got a post-commit hook script that performs a SVN update of a working copy when commits are made to the repository.

When users commit to the repository from their Windows machines using TortoiseSVN they get the following error:

post-commit hook failed (exit code 1) with output:
svn: Error converting entry in directory '/home/websites/devel/website/guides/Images' to UTF-8
svn: Can't convert string from native encoding to 'UTF-8':
svn: Teneriffa-S?\195?\188d.jpg

The file in question above is: Teneriffa-Süd.jpg notice the accented u. This is because the site is German and the files have been spelt in German.

When executing a update on the working copy at the Linux command-line no errors are encountered. The above error only exists when the post-commit hook is executed via a commit by a Windows SVN client.

Questions:

  1. Why would SVN try to change the encoding of a file?
  2. Are filenames allowed to contain chars that are outside the Windows standard ASCII ones?

Update:

It turns out that the file in question’s filename correctly displays as Teneriffa-Süd.jpg when viewed from a Windows machine (via Samba) but when I view the filename from the Linux server (using SSH and PuTTY) where the file resides I get Teneriffa-Süd.jpg

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    1. It does not change the encoding of the file. It changes the encoding of the filename (to something that every client can hopefully understand).
    2. Allowed by whom ? NTFS uses 16-bit code points, and Windows can expose the file names in various encodings, based on how you ask for it (it will try to convert them to the encoding you ask for). Now… That bit (how you ask) depends on the specific svn client you use. It sounds to me like a bug in TortoiseSVN.

    Edit to add:

    Ugh. I misunderstood the symptoms. the svn server stores everything in utf-8 (and it seems that it did that successfully).

    The post-commit hook is the bit that fails to convert from UTF-8. If I understand what you’re saying correctly, the post-commit hook on the server triggers an svn update to a shared drive (the svn server therefore starts an svn client to itself…) ? This means that the configuration that needs to be fixed is the one for the client on the server.
    Check the LANG / LC_ALL on the environment executing the svn server.. As it happens, the hooks are run in a vacuum environment (see Tip). So you should set the variable in the hook itself.

    See also this page for info on how svn handles localisation

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