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DisclaimerUnofficial, and not affiliated with Anthropic. Nearly all of this is read straight out of what ships: npm bundles, captured prompts, published docs. Anthropic's own notes go in verbatim, marked as theirs. The rest is my reading, and every entry carries the strings behind it. If one looks wrong, vote it down and say why.

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Claude Code v2.1.121

File Read encoding Parameter

What

The Read tool now accepts an encoding parameter, allowing base64 encoding for binary file reads (e.g., images).

Details
  • Description: "How to encode the bytes in contents. Defaults to utf-8 (lossy for binary); pass 'base64' to read images."
  • Response includes encoding field: "Set when the request asked for base64. Absent means utf-8 — including when an older CLI ignored the request's encoding field."
Evidence

Read encoding support (search for "How to encode the bytes")

Strings lifted out of the shipped bundle, so the claim above can be checked against them.

See this entry in the whole of v2.1.121 →