How to make a GitHub README.md render

Question

I have a README.md here but it is not showing up as rendered Markdown, it just shows the raw text. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong here?

https://github.com/slothdude/soundcloud-groupme-bot/blob/master/README.md

Answer 1

There's no way to reliably detect a file's encoding. At the end of the day, it's a guessing game.

That particular file is stored in some strange encoding. Some editors (e.g. Emacs) seem to mostly open it successfully (though there are a few strange characters that might be whitespace), but don't know what it is. When I ask Emacs what encoding it's using I get no-conversion, which isn't very helpful.

Others, like Gedit, show what looks like a mixture of kanji and rectangular symbols suggesting unknown values.

Tools like file and enca seem to have no idea what it is:

$ file README.md
README.md: data
$ enca README.md
enca: Cannot determine (or understand) your language preferences.
Please use `-L language', or `-L none' if your language is not supported
(only a few multibyte encodings can be recognized then).
Run `enca --list languages' to get a list of supported languages.

Open it in a decent text editor (ideally the one you've used to author it) and save it as UTF-8, then commit that change. I suspect that this will fix its rendering on GitHub.