My diff contains trailing whitespace - how to get rid of it?

Question

I've tried editing a php file in TextWrangler with line endings set to Unix, in NetBeans, and in vim. When I save the diff to a patch and then try to apply it, it gives whitespace errors. When I type git diff I can see ^M at the ends of my lines, but if I manually remove these in vim, it says my patch file is corrupted, and then the patch doesn't apply at all.

I create a patch with the following command:

git diff > patchname.patch

And I apply it by checking out a clean version of the file to be patched and typing

git apply patchname.patch

How can I create this patch without whitespace errors? I've created patches before and never run into this issue.

Answer 1

git apply --reject --whitespace=fix mychanges.path

Answer 2

Are you sure those are hard errors? By default, git will warn about whitespace errors, but will still accept them. If they are hard errors then you must have changed some settings. You can use the --whitespace= flag to git apply to control this on a per-invocation basis. Try

git apply --whitespace=warn patchname.patch 

That will force the default behavior, which is to warn but accept. You can also use --whitespace=nowarn to remove the warnings entirely.

The config variable that controls this is apply.whitespace.

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For reference, the whitespace errors here aren't errors with your patch. It's a code style thing that git will, by default, complain about when applying patches. Notably, it dislikes trailing whitespace. Similarly git diff will highlight whitespace errors (if you're outputting to a terminal and color is on). The default behavior is to warn, but accept the patch anyway, because not every project is fanatical about whitespace.