[Haskell-cafe] fgetc and fputc equivalents

Although much work has apparently gone into providing support for manipulation binary data I was unable to uncover a Haskell equivalent of the C fgetc and fputc functions. The Haskell equivalents work with Unicode character streams, not bytes words etcetera. I did find a library for handling arrays of bytes and such, but I did not find it to be convenient for the application I have in mind. I resolved myself to emitted Unicode 0s and 1s that are later converted to binary 0s and 1s by means of a C program. Is this functionality missing in Haskell? or did I miss something?