By default, Subversion tends to regard UTF-16 files as binary. It assigns them a MIME type of application/octet-stream. As a result, when an attempt is made to merge a change from a branched version of the file, there is always a conflict that must be hand-edited.
However, there is a solution. By giving the UTF-16 files a correct MIME type, SVN is able to perform merges just like a basic text file.
The required MIME type is one of
- text/plain;encoding=UTF-16LE
- text/plain;encoding=UTF-16BE
depending upon whether the encoding is LittleEndian or BigEndian respectively.
To set the property, use a command along the lines of
svn propset "svn:mime-type" "text/plain;encoding=UTF-16LE" *.utf-16.txt
I have found that this works with the (command-line) SVN version 1.6+ clients on both Linux and Windows.
Rob Hubbard's Blog 
Thursday, 4 April 2013 at 15:36 |
I found that a slightly different value for the svn:mime-type property is more helpful.
AFAICT, instead of using “text/plain;encoding=UTF-16LE”, the value of “text/plain;charset=UTF-16LE” provides all the capabilities of the former, but also allows the file to be viewed in a web browser (for example, viewing the file via WebSVN).