Web On Rails

Git Error: trailing whitespace, indent SP followed by a TAB, unresolved merge conflict

Posted by Akhil Bansal
April 23, 2008

I have been using Git from last few days, and faced following errors while committing:

1) Trailing whitespace
2) Indent SP followed by a TAB
3) Unresolved merge conflict

The first error “Trailing whitespace” is because of carriage-return/line-feed(windows style line feed/end). To resolve this problem comment following lines(58-60) in .git/hooks/pre-commit file:

The second one “Indent SP followed by a TAB” is because of leading spaces/tabs. To resolve this problem comment following lines(61-63) in .git/hooks/pre-commit file:

The third one “Unresolved merge conflict” is because of seven or more successive occurrence of = or < or > characters. Major chances of having seven = character in README or doc files. To resolve this problem replace following line(64) in .git/hooks/pre-commit file:

These tricks worked for me, I hope it could help you.

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Information: April 23rd, 2008; 4 Responses

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Categories: Rails; RubyonRails; Tools; Git; VCS; SCM; pre-commit

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Reader Comments

Comment Number:: 1
Written by:: Chris
Posted on:: April 24, 2008 at 4:03 am

You can also just disable the commit by removing pre-commit. The hooks run by default on Windows because it has no +x bit. Removing them does no harm.

Comment Number:: 2
Written by:: Evgeny
Posted on:: April 24, 2008 at 8:23 pm

I thought git was “good”, as in “high quality”. Why should anyone need to get dirty with git guts in this manner?

Comment Number:: 3
Written by:: Jesper Rønn-Jensen
Posted on:: May 28, 2008 at 12:58 am

Thanks a lot for posting. The whitespace error has been teasing me, but it’s still very annoying that it thinks that windows newlines are whitespace.

Comment Number:: 4
Written by:: Nate Clark
Posted on:: July 14, 2008 at 9:26 pm

This doesn’t “resolve” the problem … you are just ignoring it. To really fix the problem, remove the whitespaces and tabs used as spaces as you should … and git won’t complain.

Git Error: trailing whitespace, indent SP followed by a TAB, unresolved merge conflict

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