x-ware-ltd / access-scc-addin

Microsoft Access SCC Addin
Apache License 2.0
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Change file encoding from UCS2 to UTF-8 #30

Closed bkp7 closed 5 years ago

bkp7 commented 5 years ago

Later versions of Access (changed in Access 13/16?) output files for Forms, Reports, Macros and Queries in the UCS2 (2 bytes per character) format. The SVN tooling, specifically the Blame tool cannot deal with files encoded in this way. Therefore these items should be re-encoded into UTF-8 (which is fully supported by SVN tooling).

Every 2-byte character capable of being represented in UCS2 can be represented in UTF-8 (although the opposite is not true). This proposal therefore has no downsides.

The code would need to check whether the outgoing and incoming files are UCS2 encoded (by looking at the Byte Order Mark - BOM) before converting the encoding.

The SVN compare tool treats encoding as just one difference, ie. 2 files with different encoding can be easily compared using SVN diff.