How can I tell TortoiseHg to display a UTF-16 file as non-binary?

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In a Microsoft Access 2007 project the Access form objects are exported to files with a dedicated software by using the built-in function "SaveAsText". This is necessary because Access doesn't store any of it's code modules in isolated files at its own.

The file starts with the bytes "FF FE" (which is UTF-16 according to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark). I presume because of many NUL characters in this file, Hg treats this file as a binary file. Hence the diff pane in the TortoiseHG workbench always tells

File or diffs not displayed: File is binary.

which is quite understandable under this assumption. But nevertheless this file is just usual source code. I can view it for example in Windows' notepad without any problems.

Is there any way to tell Mercurial, that this particular file should be treated as text, not binary?

Edit: Additionally to the marked preferred answer below I decided not to change the saving behaviour, but to use the "Visual Diff" command (select file, then press Ctrl+d) instead.

tortoisehg ms-access unicode mercurial
3 Answers

This didn't exist at the time the question was asked, but now there's the msaccess-vcs-integration project, which exports/imports MS Access objects so that they can be version controlled.

Quote from the project's readme:

Encoding

For Access objects which are normally exported in UCS-2-little-endian encoding , the included module automatically converts to the source code to and from UTF-8 encoding during export/import; this is to ensure that you don't have trouble branching, merging, and comparing in tools such as Mercurial which treat any file containing 0x00 bytes as a non-diffable binary file.

If you export your forms and modules with this instead of directly using Access's SaveAsText function, Mercurial will not treat the files as binary.

user_68840
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