Special characters in Hg Commit comments

by kai on 06/02/2012



This was weird. The other day I was trying to commit something into an Hg repository. Not a new one, not a new setup – I had done thousands of successful commits into this repository in the past.

The result of my commit was weird though:

Error: transaction abort! rollback completed abort: decoding near ‘ailbox, we’re not’: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xe2 in position 24: ordinal not in range(128)!

Error message on commit

Error message on commit

What had happened? Basically – I copied some content for the commit message from a Skype discussion I was having with someone over exactly the bug fix I was going to commit. What I didn’t realise was that the apostrophe in “we’re” wasn’t an ascii-character compatible apostrophe, but a typographic apostrophe from within Skype. Anyway – it seems that this made the commit fail (It didn’t help that I didn’t read the message properly at first and though that something was wrong with me repo šŸ™‚

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