Wrong characters from "tree" command

tree -n --charset utf-8 > myapps.txt

Strip the color information [-n] from the UTF-8 output. This removes all of those prefaced color codes in TextEdit. Also, since TextEdit is not a proper programmer's editor, it will not align the output as it would if piped into BBEdit or more -r .

Here is the result from the preceding command when opened in BBEdit 13:

and in TextEdit:

With a clean installation of Catalina 10.15.1, and never touching the TextEdit preferences, here is the result of:

tree -n --charset UTF-8 Downloads > tree.txt

Default macOS language is U.S. English. Default TextEdit font is Menlo Regular, and default encoding on plain text file opening is Automatic.

In textedit you may have to change the encoding under Options from "automatic" to utf-8 (or something else, I'm not sure what terminal does)

Textedit preferences let you set the default encoding for opening files if that helps.

murrayE wrote:

I'm still getting those weird characters such as │   ├──

Here's an analysis of what is happening: ├── is the utf-8 encoding for the drawing characters 251c 2500 2500 (e2 94 9c e2 94 80 e2 94 80) being read as if were in MacRoman encoding (which is presumably TextEdit's default).

I'm mystified by the error message you are getting.

murrayE wrote:

This solved it (from https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/377260/112510 ):

Use command

tree -n --charset=ascii > ~/Desktop/myapps.txt

Fascinating. I think perhaps tree converts its own unicode to an ancient version of extended ascii which somehow textedit recognizes.

Does it work with -charset=unicode?

murrayE wrote:

Yes,

tree -n --charset=unicode > ~/Desktop/myapps.txt

does work, too!

Thanks!

From the man page for tree, it appears that the "ascii" charset is probably CP437, an ancient 8 bit encoding which does have those drawing characters. I'm not sure how TextEdit would automatically recognize that. "Unicode" is probably utf-16, which TextEdit should be able to recognize without any help.

VikingOSX wrote:

Tom,

As far as I can tell, the tree --charset unicode, or --charset ascii equally produce ISO-8859-1 output encoding.

Interesting! That encoding doesn’t contain the drawing characters however.

You need to change "Plain Text File Encoding" to Unicode for opening.

As noted before, you can't use "automatic", it has to be utf8

Using tree v1.8.0.