Detecting non-ASCII characters in a git commit hook

If you don't want to allow non-ASCII characters in your code, which can appear when pasting text from Word, you can simply add a pre commit hook to git to check for this. Create a file called pre-commit in the .git/hooks folder of your code repo with the following contents, and change the permissions to user executable (chmod u+x .git/hooks/pre-commit), and git will halt when you attempt to commit if there are non-ASCII characters in the commit (binary files are not looked at). Git will also display the character(s) found, and show the diff of the file that includes the character. Here is what the pre-commit file should look like: If you need to add non-ASCII text that you know is safe, you can temporarily disable the script by running "chmod u-x .git/hooks/pre-commit", make your commit, then "chmod u+x .git/hooks/pre-commit" to re-enable it.