John Meacham
In any case, we need tools to be able to conform to the common cases of ascii-only (withCAStrirg) and current locale (withCString).
withUTF8String would be a nice addition, but is much less important to come standard as it can easily be written by end users, unlike locale specific versions which are necessarily system dependent.
IMHO the encoding should be a parameter of an extended variant of withCString (and peekCString etc.). We need a framework for implementing encoders/decoders first. A problem with designing the framework is that it should support both pure Haskell conversions and C functions like iconv which work on arrays. We must also provide a way to signal errors. A bonus is a way to handle errors coming from another recoder without causing it to fail completely. That way one could add a fallback for unrepresentable characters, e.g. HTML entities or approximations with stripped accents. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk \__/ qrczak@knm.org.pl ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/