Re: [Haskell-cafe] Encoding-aware System.Directory functions

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 21:07, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic < ivan.miljenovic@gmail.com> wrote:

On 31 March 2011 14:51, John Millikin wrote:

...

Linux, OSX, and (probably?) FreeBSD use UTF8.

For Linux, doesn't it depend upon the locale rather than forcing UTF-8?

In theory, yes. There are environment to specify the locale encoding, and some applications attempt to obey them. In practice, no. Both Qt and GTK+ use UTF8 internally, and react poorly when run on a non-UTF8 system. Every major distribution sets the locale encoding to UTF8. Setting a non-UTF8 encoding requires digging through various undocumented configuration files, and even then many applications will simply ignore it and use UTF8 anyway.