How do I determine file encoding?

Question

Is there a git command that returns file encoding like file in Linux? That completely describes my problem. I tried searching Google but found nothing.

Answer 1

Git itself has no idea of the encoding of a file (stored as a blob, meaning as an arbitrary binary data).
See "What is the format of a git “blob”?".

The command file can still be used after a git checkout.
Or piped after a git show to read the content of a specific file, e.g.:

$ git show @~2:README.md | file -
/dev/stdin: ASCII text

tells that the file ./README.md 2 commits ago had an ASCII encoding - notice the last dash (-) denoting STDIN.

While this command:

$ git show :README.md | file -
/dev/stdin: Unicode text, UTF-8 (with BOM) text, with CRLF line terminators

tells that the same file staged in git's 'index' is gonna be Windows encoded.