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Whenever I use a character set in addition to latin in a text file (mixing Cyrillic and Latin, say), I usually choose utf-16 for the encoding. This way I can edit the file under OS X with either emacs or TextEdit.
But then ediff in emacs ceases to work. It says only that “Binary files this and that differ”.
Can ediff be somehow made to work on text files that include foreign characters?
Customize the variable
ediff-diff-optionsand add the option--text.Edit:
Ediff calls out to an external program, the GNU utility
diff, to compute the differences; however,diffdoes not understand unicode, and sees unicode encoded files as binary files. The option “–text” simply forces it to treat the input files as text files. See the manual for GNU Diffutils: Comparing and Merging Files; in particular 1.7 Binary Files and Forcing Text Comparisons.