Andrea Rossato wrote:
Hi,
supposed that, in a Linux system, in an utf-8 locale, you create a file with non ascii characters. For instance: touch abèèè
Now, I would expect that the output of a shell command such as "ls ab*" would be a string/list of 5 chars. Instead I find it to be a list of 8 chars...;-)
The file name may have five *characters*, but if it's encoded as UTF-8, then it has eight *bytes*. It appears that in spite of the locale definition, hGetContents is treating each byte as a separate character without translating the multi-byte sequences *from* UTF-8, and then putStrLn sends each of those bytes to standard output without translating the non-ASCII characters *to* UTF-8. So the second line of your program's output is correct...but only by accident. Futzing around a little bit in ghci, I see that I can define a string "\1488", but if I send that string to putStrLn, I get nothing, when I should get א (the Hebrew letter aleph). I � Unicode.