How to tell Git that settings.html is text, not binary

Question

Win7, git 1.8.3.1 (from git-scm.org).

I have a settings.html file that git thinks is binary. When I do a diff between branches, I see:

[master]> git diff master work2
diff --git a/settings.html b/settings.html
index 2e46976..620dff4 100644
Binary files a/settings.html and b/settings.html differ

I have tried saving, committing, and pushing settings.html as

• Unicode (UTF-8 with signature) -- Codepage 65001
• UTF-8, no signature
• US-ASCII codepage 20127

No joy; git thinks this one html file is binary.
How can I get git to treat this -- and all html files -- as text?
(I suspect VS2012 is muddying the waters, but the other html/css/js files in the project are treated as text.)

Thanks for any insight...

Answer 1

Add the following to a file called .gitattributes in the root of your repo:

*.html text

See gitattributes(5) for more information.