MR K P SCHUPKE wrote:

...

The problem is that if you are reading single bytes, 233 is not necessarily é.

Erm, Internationalisation is not my thin as such... but I can't help commenting that from a systems point of view this is an utterly bad sitiation to be in... I though Haskell used unicode? I thought in unicode the id of a character was fixed irrespective of language. Where is unicode support lacking?

Regards, Keean Schupke.

quoting from the latest version of Unicode standard: "The Unicode Standard specifies a numeric value (code point) and a name for each of its characters.[...] Unicode provides for three encoding forms: a 32-bit form (UTF-32), a 16-bit form (UTF- 16), and an 8-bit form (UTF-8)." Hence in Unicode proper, characters are encoded as numbers (or actually "code points"), not bytes. The byte-oriented encoding variant is UTF-8. In UTF-8, however the byte "233" does not represent any character on its own, but can only occur as the first byte of a 3 byte sequence. OTOH, UTF-8 encodes characters in ASCII range in the same way as ASCII. Regards, Marcin Benke