Question

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Why does Mercurial think my SQL files are binary?

I generated a complete set of scripts for the stored procedures in a database. When I created a Mercurial repository and added these files they were all added as binary. Obviously, I still get the benefits of versioning, but lose a lot of efficiency, ‘diff’ing, etc… of text files. I verified that these files are indeed all just text.

Why is it doing this?

What can I do to avoid it?

IS there a way to get Hg to change it mind about these files?

Here is a snippet of changeset log:

   496.1 Binary file SQL/SfiData/Stored Procedures/dbo.pFindCustomerByMatchCode.StoredProcedure.sql has changed
   497.1 Binary file SQL/SfiData/Stored Procedures/dbo.pFindUnreconcilableChecks.StoredProcedure.sql has changed
   498.1 Binary file SQL/SfiData/Stored Procedures/dbo.pFixBadLabelSelected.StoredProcedure.sql has changed
   499.1 Binary file SQL/SfiData/Stored Procedures/dbo.pFixCCOPL.StoredProcedure.sql has changed
   500.1 Binary file SQL/SfiData/Stored Procedures/dbo.pFixCCOrderMoneyError.StoredProcedure.sql has changed

Thanks in advance for your help
Jim

Answer 1

In fitting with Mercurial’s views on binary files, it does not actually track file types, which means that there is no way for a user to mark a file as binary or not binary.

As tonfa and Rudi mentioned, Mercurial determines whether a file is binary or not by seeing if there is a NUL byte anywhere in the file. In the case of UTF-[16|32] files, a NUL byte is pretty much guaranteed.

To “fix” this, you would have to ensure that the files are encoded with UTF-8 instead of UTF-16. Ideally, your database would have a setting for Unicode encoding when doing the export. If that’s not the case, another option would be to write a precommit hook to do it (see How to convert a file to UTF-8 in Python for a start), but you would have to be very careful about which files you were converting.