René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Encoding issue with tags in packed-refs file","articleBody":"Tags found in the `packed-refs` file that can be created by the Git command `git pack-refs` do not have to be UTF8 encoded. In these cases, GitPython fails to read these tags due to assuming they should be UTF8 compatible.\n\nThe source for this issue is found here:\nhttps://github.com/gitpython-developers/GitPython/blob/main/git/refs/symbolic.py#L124\n\n```python\nwith open(cls._get_packed_refs_path(repo), \"rt\", encoding=\"UTF-8\") as fp:\n``` \n\nA working example (using a repository with a non-utf8 tag):\n```shell\ngit clone https://github.com/ACRA/acra\ncd acra\n``` \n\nCreate a Python script with the following content:\n```python\nimport git\nrepo = git.Repo(\".\")\nprint(repo.tags)\n```\nExecute the script:\n```shell\npython script.py\n```\nResult:\n`UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 6216: invalid continuation byte`","author":{"url":"https://github.com/benmss","@type":"Person","name":"benmss"},"datePublished":"2025-08-06T03:51:19.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":1},"url":"https://github.com/2064/GitPython/issues/2064"}