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How to fix comment character encoding in TortoiseHG

I imported a couple of repositories from SVN into Mercurial and discovered that characters not present in the standard ASCII table have become mangled in the comments… Or at least they looked mangled in the console output as well as in TortoiseHG – now, the console is not that important, but how to fix this in Tortoise?

I tried searching for a solution on how to modify the import process and found nothing. Tried to add a new comment to the repository with a non-ASCII character and got a Python error (“expected string, QString found”). Some said that I should change my Windows’ default system encoding (which is English(US)), and that solved the problem but I would have liked a simpler solution, since changing the default encoding used to cause other problems in the past. I managed to find a couple of workarounds that solve the problem of console display and involve setting environment variables… Would it work for Tortoise? Actually: it does. The solution is simple: go to (this is on Windows 7) Control Panel – System – Advanced System Settings – Environment Variables, add a new user variable called HGENCODING and set it’s value to either “utf-8” or your code page (mine is “cp1250”). TortoiseHg respects this. There’s a slight difference in the two values, though, because the diff viewer doesn’t really like “utf-8”, it prefers the concrete code page. There may be other components that behave like this, so I suppose that setting the code page is the optimal solution.

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