Subject: Re: [bug] git diff --word-diff gives wrong result for utf-8 chinese

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2022 11:52:38 +0100

On Tue, Nov 29 2022, Ping Yin wrote:

> Result of "git diff"
>
> -  为1
> +  为2
>
> or (if chinese can not be displayed correctly)
>
> -  <E4><B8><BA>1
> +  <E4><B8><BA>2
>
> Actual result of "git diff --color-words"
>
> <E4><B8>[-<BA>1-]{+<BA>2+}
>
> Expected result of "git diff --color-words"
>
> 为[-1-]{+2+}
>
> or (if chinese can not be displayed correctly)

I think we could provide new ways to do per-language diffs, right now
you can use --word-diff-regex, but it would be handy to e.g. have a
built-in collection of those (or other non-regex boundary algorithms)
for Chinese etc.

But as for considering this a bug, or changing the existing behavior I
think we'd need to deal with:

 * We (approximately) split on space now, which is certainly
   ASCII-biased, and outside of CJK fairly somewhat universal.

 * If we're going to split on "real words" in some cross-language aware
   way, are we going to run into conflicts between what different
   languages would consider sensible rules?

 * We probably don't want to make the "diff" dependent on the user's
   locale, but e.g. saying "I want a Chinese diff" via a CLI option
   would be OK.

 * Even for say Chinese, there's probably interesting edge cases when
   it's combined with other languages or character sets (e.g. Chinese +
   HTML).