On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 08:39 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
* The iconv library works only on lazy ByteStrings, and does not handle Strings or strict ByteStrings
There is a very good reason for this. The right solution in this particular example is not to overload every internal string operation in the iconv lib (which would be far far too slow) but to convert to/from your favourite representation on the edge. So in this case those conversions would be pack/unpack or the similar equivalents for strict <-> lazy bytestrings. If we want it to be generic then we want a class of string like things that provides conversions only, not operations. For example we could export iconv as: iconv :: StringLike string => Encoding -> Encoding -> string -> string iconv to from = (convertStringRep :: Lazy.ByteString -> string) . theRealIconv . (convertStringRep :: string -> Lazy.ByteString) class StringLike string where ... convertStringRep :: (StringLike s1, StringLike s2) => s1 -> s2 -- analogous to fromIntegral Duncan