Glynn Clements
The Haskell functions accept or return Strings but interface to OS functions which (at least on Unix) deal with arrays of bytes (char*), and the encoding issues are essentially ignored. If you pass strings containing anything other than ISO-8859-1, you lose.
I'm not sure it's as bad as all that. You lose the correct Unicode code points (i.e. chars will have the wrong values, and strings may be the wrong lenght), but I think you will be able to get the same bytes out as you read in. So in that sense, Char-based IO is somewhat encoding neutral. So one can have Unicode both in IO and internally, it's just that you don't get both at the same time :-) -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants