Hi Ganesh,
On 1 November 2011 07:16, Ganesh Sittampalam
Can anyone point me at the rationale and details of the change and/or suggest workarounds?
This is my implementation of Python's PEP 383 [1] for Haskell. IMHO this behaviour is much closer to what users expect.For example, getDirectoryContents "." >>= print shows Unicode filenames properly. As a result of this change we were able to close quite a few outstanding GHC bugs. PEP-383 behaviour always does the right thing on setups with a consistent text encoding for filenames, command line arguments and the like (Windows, or *nix where the system locale is e.g. UTF-8 and all filenames are encoded in that locale). However, there are legitimate use cases where the program has more information about how something is encoded than just the system locale, and in those cases you should *encode* the String from getDirectoryContents using GHC.IO.Encoding.fileSystemEncoding and then *decode* it with your preferred TextEncoding. In your case I think you want GHC.IO.Encoding.latin1. You can use a helper function like this to make this easier: reencode :: TextEncoding -> TextEncoding -> String -> String reencode from_enc to_enc from = unsafeLocalState $ GHC.Foreign.withCStringLen from_enc (GHC.Foreign.peekCStringLen to_enc) Hope that helps, Max [1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0383/