Error: source sequence is illegal/malformed utf-8

[airblade]

I am trying to gist a patch file of Vim's source code and I get the error in the title.

file -a a.diff produces text/x-diff; charset=unknown-8bit.

[airblade]

I'd gist the file so you could see it...but that's the problem ;)

[ConradIrwin]

Unfortunately the gist API only accepts utf-8 encoded files, so there's no obvious way to fix this immediately. I guess we could try and guess the charset and then replace unknown characters by the replacement character, but that seems likely to go wrong. Any other ideas?

[airblade]

No other ideas unfortunately. (I'm not really sure what encoding Vim's source uses, let alone its encoding tests, but I have found I need to use :e ++enc=utf-8 somefile to prevent Vim from garbling the files when I open them.)

Thanks for the prompt response!

[skull-squadron]

If a file cannot be encoded via the API, it would be nice to have gist automate the following hackaround:

1. Create a empty gist with some dummy file
2. git clone git@gist.github.com:/{{gist_id}}.git to a temporary dir
3. Remove dummy file
4. Add binary files or whatever else
5. Upload the git (git add ..., git commit ..., git push ...)

[ryan-williams]

I wrote a script that does the steps above: gist-dir.

• uploads whole directories or specific files in a provided directory (default: $PWD)
• reasonably feature-ful CLI
  • I used it to upload itself to this gist:

    gist-dir -cop gist-dir gist_dir.py octocat.png

  • handles images (binary data)!
• if directory is already a git repository, pushes HEAD to a newly-created gist, in existing git repos
• otherwise: pushes directory contents to a newly-created gist
• operates in-place by adding the newly-created gist as a remote (instead of git cloneing)

hth!