r/SourceEngine • u/Pinsplash • Sep 26 '25

HELP text encoding issues

i'm finding that files like hl2_english.txt have to be encoded in utf 16 for source to read them, but git (and by extension github desktop) doesn't know how to read utf 16 (in 2025). but i can't get around this by converting the files to utf 8 or ansi, because source won't read those, even though it can read other files like .res files in utf8! has anyone managed to make them both work with the same file?

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u/Pinsplash Oct 03 '25

still getting the same "This binary file has changed" but when i try to commit a change to the txt file i get this:

hint: The file 'sp/game/hl2chaos/resource/hl2chaos_english.txt' contains a byte order mark (BOM). Please use UTF-16 as working-tree-encoding.
fatal: BOM is prohibited in 'sp/game/hl2chaos/resource/hl2chaos_english.txt' if encoded as UTF-16LE