Discussed in #2971

Issue

Currently, running a command like the following will print a warning:

• Related Issue Silence warnings #823

printf "First\0" | bat -p

The warning is defined in src/printer.rs:

The decision to label the input as BINARY seems to be made in src/input.rs:

A hacky workaround is to make the first line empty, use bat, and then remove the first line:

printf "\nFirst\0" | bat -p | sed '1d'

Proposed solution

A new flag that doesn't label content_type as BINARY when the first line ends with a NUL byte:

# naming the flag '--text' to align with 'grep/git diff'
printf "First\0" | bat -p --text

The crate ¹ used to determine if content is binary states:

//! encoding). Note that **this analysis can fail**. For example, even if unlikely, UTF-8-encoded
//! text can legally contain NULL bytes. Conversely, some particular binary formats (like binary

Based on this, a --text flag would be very appropriate, similar to how grep and git diff have one as well.

printf "First\0" | grep 'First'
# grep: (standard input): binary file matches

printf "First\0" | grep --text 'First'
# First