If you don't allow non-ascii then you may have to mangle some people's names in the copyright header. It's good to check files for unexpected characters, thoug

If you don't allow non-ascii then you may have to mangle some people's names in the copyright header. It's good to check files for unexpected characters, though. Here's some Perl to do it: perl -e 'binmode(STDIN, ":utf8"); binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8"); foreach (split(//, join("", <STDIN>))) { ++$c{$_}; } foreach (sort(keys %c)) { printf "%8d %s\n", $c{$_}, $_; }' I tested that on a text file I was working on ... and I discovered that the file contained a BOM (U+FEFF), not at the start of the file, but at a random point in the middle of the file. I've deleted it. Who knows what problems it might have caused for me later? You could have a pre-commit git hook that refers to a whitelist of allowed non-ascii characters, or also allow all alphabetic characters, or something like that.