On 19 January 2005 05:31, John Meacham wrote:

A while ago I wrote a glibc specific implementation of the CWString library. I have since made several improvements:

* No longer glibc specific, should compile and work on any system with iconv (which is unix standard) (but there are still glibc specific optimizations) * general iconv library for conversion to any other supported character sets * LocaleIO, a plug in replacement for many of the standard prelude and IO calls which transparently handle locale encoding.

and best of all, it now has a darcs repository.

http://repetae.net/john/recent/out/HsLocale.html

It could still using some fleshing out, LocaleIO is still incomplete, I add to it as I need a function, but I figure I should make it available in case the CWString stuff came in handy for implementing the FFI spec for ghc.

I'd like to get a correct CString implementation into GHC's libraries. I think the CWString implementation we have now is good enough, but CString should be doing locale encoding/decoding (as you know). At the same time, we should check all the withCString calls to see whether they should really be withCAString (since withCString is about to get quite a bit slower). Would you be interested in helping with this, or even putting together a patch? It's probably too late for 6.4, though.

PS. is there a way to replace the top level error handler in ghc? (from a haskell library) I'd like to be able to print the error messages with the LocaleIO library as it is the only place where the wrong encoding still can leak out.

There's no way to replace the handler, I'm afraid. Cheers, Simon